Jordi Pujol
(Jordi Pujol i Soley; Barcelona, 1930) Spanish politician, president of the Generalitat of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003.He studied medicine, although he did not feel a special vocation.His nationalistic and religious sentiment was already manifested in his youth, when he carried out apostolate work in the slums of his hometown; thus, he participated in the creation of the Catholic institution Catòlics Catalans.
Once he finished his degree, he worked in the Fides Cuatrecases pharmaceutical laboratories, and took part in subversive incidents, such as the tram strike that took place in Barcelona in 1956, the dismissal of the president of the newspaper La Vanguardia or the incident at the Palacio de la Música in 1960, in which he interrupted a concert attended by Francisco Franco and his ministers to sing a Catalan anthem banned by the regime.He was sentenced by a court martial to seven years in prison.
Jordi Pujol
At the beginning of the sixties he founded with other financiers the Catalan Bank, which was acquired in 1959 by his family and, subsequently, created the Banco Industrial de Catalunya and formed an Institute of Studies to undertake a series of economic, cultural and social activities under the motto fer country , which served to the defense of Catalan values.In 1972 he founded a political formation, the Action Groups at the Service of Catalonia (GASC), which two years later would become the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC).
1977 is the year in which he decides to dedicate himself to politics; Thus, he takes part in the Commission of ten , presents his candidacy for deputy for Barcelona in the Madrid Congress by the Catalan Minority parliamentary group and is part of the Executive Council of the Generalitat de Catalunya.In the 1979 elections, he renewed his deputy seat, which he left a year later to run for the Catalan Parliament for Convergence.That same year, 1980, he was appointed President of the Generalitat.
In 1984, Convergencia y Unió (CiU), a political coalition led by him, won the elections to the Catalan Parliament, which allowed him to continue occupying the Presidency of the Generalitat, a position he renewed in May of the following year.Until 1986 the legal actions taken against him and against Banca Catalana for appropriation of funds lasted, charges of which the Provincial Court finally exonerated him for lack of evidence.
In 1987 he was elected vice-president of the Association of the Regions of Europe (ARE)-which until then had been the Council of the Regions of Europe-.In 1988 he was elected for a new term to the presidency of the Generalitat and, in 1989, president of the Democratic Convergence party, positions that he revalidated in 1992 for the fourth time and with a parliamentary majority.
In that same year he held the Presidency of the Assembly of European Regions (ARE), with a large majority of votes, ahead of Manuel Fraga and the French Marie Christine Blandin.In 1993, the CiU coalition led by Pujol became a political force in support-not a coalition-for the PSOE, the party in power at the time.Three years later, CiU once again became a hinge party so that, on this occasion, the Popular Party, which had achieved electoral victory in the general elections but without an absolute majority, could form a government.
On March 31, 2001, Pujol announced his intention not to run in the regional elections of 2003 and presented his 'dolphin', Artur Mas, as the new candidate of his CiU formation for the regional presidency.Twenty-one years after taking office, the head of the Catalan executive stated that his withdrawal from the electoral struggle did not imply his political retirement or an early call for the elections.To officially announce his resignation from what was going to be his seventh electoral contest (he won the previous six, three with an absolute majority), Pujol chose the day on which UDC and CDC, the partners of the regional government, signed a new agreement to become a federation of parties.
Jordi Pujol is the author of several books, among which are Fer poble, fer Catalunya , (1965), Construir Catalunya , Emigration and the problem of Catalonia , Una politics per Catalunya , (1976), Des dels turons a l'altra banda del riu (Escrits de presó) (1978) and Neither separatism nor regionalism, nationalism .
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