Gaspar Llamazares

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Gaspar Llamazares Trigo (Logroño, November 28, 1957) is a Spanish politician and doctor. Between June 2015 and January 2019, he was a deputy of the General Board of the Principality of Asturias. Since September 2012, he has been the spokesperson for Izquierda Abierta.

Between 2000 and 2008 he served as general coordinator of the United Left (IU), succeeding Julio Anguita. His coordination period was characterized by the purpose of adopting eco-socialist policies, marking differences with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). However, in successive elections IU continued to lose representation. After the results of the 2008 general elections in which IU only won two seats, Llamazares submitted his resignation, one month before the IX Federal Assembly. In October 2008 he was relieved by Cayo Lara.

His current of thought remained within the IU under the name llamazaristas or Izquierda Abierta, which in 2012 became a political party integrated into the IU.

For fifteen years, from 2000 to 2015, he was a representative for Asturias and Madrid in Congress. In the 2015 regional elections, he was the head of the IU list and candidate for the presidency of the autonomous community. On January 21, 2019, he resigned from his act as regional deputy and announced that he would not run in the primaries to be a candidate for the IU in the elections of May 26 of that same year. On February 1, he resigned from IU.

Biography

Early Years

The second of a family of six siblings, he spent his childhood and youth in Salinas, a town in the Asturian council of Castrillón. He studied at the Faculties of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Madrid and Oviedo, where he finished his undergraduate studies.The profession of doctor comes from family tradition since his father was also a doctor.

As a result of his political activity as a representative of medical students at the university, he ended up founding the magazine Bocetos, a magazine that sought to propose a more social approach to medicine in the face of biologicist paradigms who then dominated medical science. Later he complemented his studies with a Master of Public Health at the University of Havana. In 1985 he became a professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Santiago de Compostela and later in the Family Medicine Teaching Unit in Cazoña (Cantabria).

Political activity

He began his political activity in the Communist Party of Asturias in 1981, through participation in the Castrillón group and in the Health Commission of the Central Committee. In 1988 he was elected general secretary and general coordinator of the United Left in Asturias, defeating the sector led by Gerardo Iglesias. In 1991 he became a deputy in the General Assembly of the Principality of Asturias, was spokesman for the parliamentary group Izquierda Unida and continued a collaboration maintained until then with successive socialist governments in the region. In 1995 he was one of the protagonists of the controversial break with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, which led the Popular Party to the government of Asturias.

On a national level, at the end of 1999 Julio Anguita resigned from continuing to lead the coalition for the general elections the following year due to several cardiovascular episodes, and was replaced by Francisco Frutos. This applied a policy of rapprochement with the PSOE that ultimately meant the failure of both parties and the victory by an absolute majority of the PP, although the setback was greater for the IU, which lost 13 deputies and half of its electorate.^{[citation required]} Llamazares, for his part, obtained the act of deputy in Congress for Asturias. That same year, combining the votes of various IU currents critical of the outgoing leadership, he was elected in the VI Federal Assembly as General Coordinator by a narrow margin over Francisco Frutos.

UI General Coordinator

Calls in 2007.

Gaspar Llamazares coordinated the IU relying on the PSOE and with a policy of confrontation with the PCE, led by Francisco Frutos, and restored relations with Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (ICV), while maintaining Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (EUiA)) as a formal reference in Catalonia. Likewise, he tried to give the IU a more eco-socialist orientation than a communist or libertarian one.In 2001, Ezker Batua-Berdeak (IU-EB) joined the Basque Government, agreeing with the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Eusko Alkartasuna (EA).. In 2002, the IU abstained from outlawing Batasuna when Llamazares expressed his opposition to the Law on Parties, and 11 years later he did come out in favor of outlawing the far-right Alianza Nacional.

Since then and until the end of the 2004-2008 legislature, he has been the Principal Spokesman of the Parliamentary Group of the United Left-Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds and spokesman in the Constitutional, Foreign Affairs and Mixed Commission for the European Union. In this facet, he advocates for a rapprochement of the left-wing governments of Latin America to Spain. His criticism and frontal opposition to the policy of the Spanish governments of José María Aznar in their alignment for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan carried out by the then president of the United States George W. Bush, as well as with the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for his policy of sending more troops to Afghanistan.

In 2007, by calling a primaries, he was proclaimed IU candidate for the general elections of March 2008. After Izquierda Unida's poor results in said elections, in which IU lost three of the five deputies it had, in the worst electoral result of the coalition, announced his retirement as General Coordinator of Izquierda Unida, without abandoning his seat as a deputy, blaming bipartisanship and the electoral system on this bad result, which he described as unfair.

UI Refoundation

Gaspar Llamazares has always stood out for being a very active politician in social demands. In this 2006 image, in a demonstration of support for the self-determination of Western Sahara in Madrid.

The IX Federal Assembly of the coalition, held on November 15 and 16, 2008, concluded without electing a new General Coordinator to replace Gaspar Llamazares, due to the disagreement between the different currents of the coalition. These currents were reflected in five candidacies: the one articulated around the PCE, which obtained 43% of the votes in the election of the Federal Political Council; the lamazarista (Open UI), 27%; the so-called National II or third way, articulated around Catalan, Madrid and Aragonese leaders, and which in the previous assembly supported Gaspar Llamazares, 19%; a fourth list that brought together critical sectors of the PCE, Basques and Murcians as well as the majority from Extremadura, 6%; and that made up of the CUT and the Andalusian critics, 5%. A commission, chaired by Cayo Lara, who was a candidate of the current led by the PCE for the General Coordination and coordinator of IU Castilla-La Mancha, was in charge of preparing the convocation of the complete Political Council (in the assembly only the half, 90 members; the other 90 are elected by the territorial federations).

In 2011 together with Esther García, candidate for IU senator in Asturias.

Finally, the Federal Political Council, convened on December 14, elected Cayo Lara as general coordinator of the coalition with 55.08% of the votes, against the candidate of the National II Joan Josep Nuet. The other sector close to Gaspar Llamazares ultimately preferred not to present a candidate and to abstain.

Thus, the new coordinator Cayo Lara stressed from the outset the commitment to move the IU away from the PSOE, considering that it defends neoliberalism like the Popular Party, and to re-found the anti-capitalist left, to converge with other forces of left and go out and present an alternative to the crisis.

For the 2011 General Elections, he ran as head of the list for the Asturias constituency and was elected, obtaining 13.27% and almost 85,000 votes, practically doubling the percentage of votes for Izquierda Unida in that community with respect to to the 2008 elections, in which he obtained less than 50,000 votes. His for Asturias was the IU candidacy that received the highest percentage in the 2011 general elections.

Creation of the Open Left

Main article: Open left

Llamazares was one of the main promoters of the creation of the new Izquierda Abierta (IAb) party integrated into the IU with the aim of formalizing this ideological current and being on an equal footing with the PCE. Thus, in July 2011 announced its constitution making it clear that it would open the doors of the party to non-militants, one of its unique characteristics being to build ties with other sectors and political forces inside and outside Izquierda Unida to build a "broad front" of the left and become the "political representation" of "outrage".

Following its Constituent Assembly in September 2012, Llamazares was elected co-spokesperson along with Montserrat Muñoz.

Candidate for the Principality of Asturias

In January 2015, he contested and prevailed over the then general coordinator Manuel González Orviz in primaries, to lead the list of the coalition in the Principality of Asturias in the regional elections in May. He obtained his support in Oviedo and Gijón, the main coalition groups in Asturias. Thus, he presented himself for the third time —he had done so before in 1995 and 1999— as a candidate for the Presidency of the Principality. The list he headed won five seats in the regional legislative chamber and was considered the greatest success of the IU in the regional elections and municipal that suffered a general disaster throughout Spain.

Act political platform

On April 19, 2017, Baltasar Garzón presented together with Llamazares the new political platform Act with the main objective of "giving a voice to the left that does not feel represented" by either the PSOE or Podemos, although they declared that They would not run in the general election. Personalities such as the lawyer Cristina Almeida; Federico Mayor Zaragoza (former director of Unesco); the poet Luis García Montero (2015 candidate for the Presidency of the Community of Madrid for IU-CM); and the journalist Teresa Aranguren.

Four months later, they announced the registration of said organization in the registry of Political Parties of the Ministry of the Interior, declaring that they did not rule out running for the next elections, although the main reason for registering it as a party was to acquire the exclusivity of the brand.

On December 24, 2018, he announced his resignation from all federal positions in IU that he held. to the primaries to be a candidate for the IU in the regional elections on May 26 of that same year. On February 1, he resigned from Izquierda Unida by means of a letter sent to the general coordinator Alberto Garzón.

In February 2019, Actúa chose Llamazares to head its list for the European elections, running under the umbrella of the European Spring promoted by DiEM 25, a movement led by Yanis Varoufakis.

In the April 2019 general elections, he headed the Actúa list. The party was present in eight constituencies and achieved 30,448 votes, leaving it out of the Congress of Deputies.

Books

From the democratic dream to the populist nightmare (ISIDORA EDITIONS ROSA LOVE OF THE OLMO, 2022)
Pandemonium (diary of pandemic and populism)
The wounded left (The Book Sphere, 2020).
The Red Book of Gaspar Llamazares (1001 EDITIONS, 2012)

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