Jaime Mayor Oreja

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Mayorand the second or maternal family name is Oreja.

Jaime Mayor Oreja MP MEP
Minister of the Interior
In office 4 May 1996 –27 February 2001
Prime Minister	José María Aznar
Preceded by	Juan Alberto Belloch
Succeeded by	Mariano Rajoy
Member of the European Parliament
In office 13 June 2004 –25 May 2014
Constituency	Spain
Member of the Congress of Deputies
In office 3 March 1996 –24 April 2001
Constituency	Alava
In office 1 April 1979 –28 October 1982
Constituency	Gipuzkoa
Member of the Basque Parliament
In office 8 June 2001 –2 July 2004
Constituency	Biscay
In office 18 December 1990 –29 March 1996
Constituency	Álava
In office 22 March 1984 –1 October 1986
Constituency	Gipuzkoa
Personal details
Political party	People's Party (1989–present)
Other political affiliations	Union of the Democratic Centre (1977–1983) People's Coalition (1983–1986)

Jaime Mayor Oreja (born 12 July 1951) is a former ^[1] Spanish conservative politician of the People's Party. He served as member of the Basque Parliament, of the Spanish Parliament, and of the European Parliament, as well as being Spanish Minister of the Interior between 1996 and 2000. He is known for his outspoken anti-ETA rhetoric ^[2] and social ultracatholicism ^[3]

Biography

Early life

Mayor Oreja was born and raised in San Sebastián, in the Spanish Basque Country, where he attended a school run by Marianists. He earned an agricultural engineering degree and briefly studied law before dropping out to enter politics. ^[4]

Mayor Oreja's family is deeply rooted in conservative Spanish politics. His grandfather Marcelino Oreja Elósegui, a Catholic activist and Carlist politician, was a victim of the Asturian strike action of 1934, and his uncle Marcelino Oreja Aguirre served extensively in the Spanish civil service and in the European Parliament. It was Marcelino Oreja who introduced his nephew to politics.

Early career

Oreja joined the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) in 1977. After failing to be elected in the first democratic elections to the Cortes Generales since Francisco Franco's death, he won a seat with the UCD in the 1979 elections. Shortly after the elections, he was appointed delegate of the Spanish government to the Basque Government. He was also involved in the drafting of the Basque Statute of Autonomy, serving in the Basque General Council, precursor to the autonomous parliament as a minister for tourism. He left the Cortes Generales in 1982 as the Socialist Party won a majority. He kept his position as delegate of the Spanish government to the Basque Government until 1983, when the UCD began to collapse. He joined the People's Coalition, and stood as their candidate for lehendakari in the 1984 Basque elections. Disagreements within the governing party, the Basque Nationalist Party, a snap election was called in 1986. Mayor Oreja then retired from politics.

Return to Politics

In 1989, at the request of Manuel Fraga, Mayor Oreja returned to politics to help the newly founded People's Party (PP). He was the party's candidate in the Basque elections of 1990, and managed the European Parliament elections of 1989, where the party made no significant gains or losses. In 1994, the party nearly doubled its seats.

Ministerial career

After José María Aznar's win in the 1996 Spanish Parliamentary Elections, Mayor Oreja was appointed Minister of the Interior. Upon entering government, he had to deal with the ETA's kidnapping of José Antonio Ortega Lara. In 1998, ETA declared a ceasefire. Mayor Oreja took a hawkish stance, denouncing the ceasefire as false truce. He famously coined the term "tregua-trampa", or "trap truce", and he publicly stated his refusal to engage in any political negotiation with ETA. ^[5] His hard stance against ETA's terrorism earned him over much praise amongst Spanish conservatives. ^[6]

2001 Basque candidacy and MEP

His tenure as Minister of the Interior marked Mayor Oreja's height of influence, and thereafter his political career experienced an irregular decline. In 2001, his party chose him as candidate to the Basque regional presidency in that year's election, so he resigned as Minister of the Interior to focus on running the campaign.

The 2001 Basque elections took place in the aftermath of the collapse of ETA's 1998 ceasefire. Mayor Oreja ran on an aggressive ticket, ^{[7] [8]} defending the Spanish Constitution and the Statute of Gernika as the main framework to defeat ETA, and vigorously attacked the incumbent Basque Nationalist Party because Mayor Oreja alleged they were complicit with terrorism. ^[9] Although his ticket never polled high enough to secure a plurality of seats in the Basque parliament, Mayor Oreja and the Spanish Socialist Party made it clear that were the incumbent lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe to fail to secure an absolute majority in the Basque parliament, Mayor Oreja would form a minority government instead with the Socialist's support. ^[7] Albeit Mayor Oreja improved his party's results and attained 22.9% of the votes, this proved insufficient to unseat Ibarretxe, who obtained 42.4% of the votes with a 6.2% swing in his favour. As a result, Mayor Oreja failed to become lehendakari, and Ibarretxe was re-elected.

He remained leader of the opposition in the Basque country until 2004. During this time, he developed a reputation as an absentee parliamentarian, ^[10] particularly after missing a key vote in 2002 that enabled the Ibarretxe government to pass its budget by just one vote (Mayor Oreja's). ^[11]

In 2004 he was mentioned as a potential successor to the outgoing Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, ^[12] but the latter finally opted for Mariano Rajoy instead. Shortly afterwards, Mayor Oreja quit his seat in the Basque parliament and ran for MEP in that year's European parliament elections, where he secured a seat. For the next ten years, he occupied several senior positions in the European People's Party group of the European Parliament.

His position against abortion ^{[13] [14]} and LGBT rights, ^{[15] [16]} and his hard-line stance against terrorism, ^[17] placed him at the far right of his party. After a series of public spats with his party's leadership over their strategy in the final days of ETA, ^{[18] [19]} Mayor Oreja decided not to run again for the European Parliament in the 2014 election, and largely abandoned public life. Since then, he has chaired the Fundación Valores y Sociedad, ^[20] an ultraconservative lobby devoted to extending ultra-catholic ideas throughout the Spanish-speaking world. ^[3] He has since publicly engaged with the defence of what he deems as "traditional" values, including positions against gender studies, ^[21] women's rights, ^[22] and LGBTQ rights. ^[23] He has denounced what he deems as the moral decadence of modern society, ^[24] and claimed that abortion is something "worthy of bolcheviques", ^[25] and deployed intense lobbying activity defending these stances in Latin America. ^[3]

References

1. "Mayor Oreja deja la política".
2. "Noticias de terrorismo". Lukor (in Spanish). 22 July 2009. Archived from the original on 22 July 2009. Retrieved 16 March 2017.
3. "La segunda vida de Mayor Oreja: llevar a Europa y América Latina el ultracatolicismo español".
4. Oliden, Kepa (30 April 2006). "El último revolucionario". El Diario Vasco (in Spanish). Vocento . Retrieved 16 March 2017.
5. "Mayor Oreja advierte de que el Gobierno no aceptará una "tregua-trampa" de ETA" . Retrieved 3 October 2019.
6. "Jaime Mayor Oreja: "Parece que mis principios están en minoría en el Partido Popular"" . Retrieved 3 October 2019.
7. "Jaime Mayor Oreja, Spain's tough Basque". The Economist (in Spanish). 8 March 2011. Archived from the original on 22 February 2012. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
8. Tremlett, Giles (14 May 2001). "Vote split in the battle for Basque hearts". The Guardian . Guardian News & Media Limited . Retrieved 11 March 2019.
9. Daly, Emma (14 May 2001). "Moderate Basque Nationalists Win Spanish Regional Election". NY Times (in Spanish). The New York Times Company . Retrieved 11 March 2019.
10. Tussell, Javier (23 May 2012). El aznarato: El gobierno del Partido Popular 1996-2003. Madrid: Penguin Random House Grupo. p. 392. ISBN   9788403012691. OCLC   055208137.
11. Gorospe, Pedro (28 December 2002). "La ausencia de Mayor Oreja permite a Ibarretxe aprobar los Presupuestos". El País (in Spanish). Prisa . Retrieved 11 March 2019.
12. "Jaime Mayor Oreja". Bloomberg.com . 11 June 2001. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
13. Carvajal, Álvaro (12 November 2013). "Mayor Oreja: 'El derecho al aborto es una aberración'". El Mundo (in Spanish). Retrieved 11 March 2019.
14. Cabrera, Elena (13 September 2013). "Jaime Mayor Oreja: "El aborto no puede ser considerado un derecho"". El Diario (in Spanish). Retrieved 11 March 2019.
15. Moraga, Carmen (5 February 2014). "Un informe a favor de los derechos del colectivo gay divide al PP de Mayor Oreja en Estrasburgo". El Diario (in Spanish). Retrieved 11 March 2019.
16. Bastante, Jesús (20 December 2016). "Ultracatólicos apadrinados por Mayor Oreja lanzan un manifiesto contra las "leyes totalitarias" de género y LGTB". El Diario (in Spanish). Retrieved 11 March 2019.
17. Molina, Ferrer (20 August 2017). "Mayor Oreja: "Los españoles merecían que les explicaran los atentados en español"". El Español (in Spanish). Retrieved 11 March 2019.
18. Europa Press (18 February 2014). "Mayor Oreja no irá al Congreso del PPE, al que Rajoy viajará con una amplia representación del partido". El Mundo (in Spanish). Madrid. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
19. Elordi Cué, Carlos (3 September 2012). "Mayor y Aguirre reprochan a Rajoy el 'caso Bolinaga' en una tensa reunión". El País . Madrid: Prisa . Retrieved 11 March 2019.
20. "Jaime Mayor Oreja: Presidente" . Retrieved 3 October 2019.
21. ""El hombre es hombre y la mujer es mujer"".
22. "Jaime Mayor Oreja: "Parece que mis principios están en minoría en el Partido Popular"".
23. "The Barcelona bombing caused by the gay decadence according to Mayor Oreja".
24. "Jaime Mayor Oreja: "Parece que mis principios están en minoría en el Partido Popular"".
25. ""El aborto, cosa de bolcheviques"". Archived from the original on 9 March 2010.

External links

• Personal profile of Jaime Mayor Oreja in the European Parliament 's database of members
• Declaration (PDF) of financial interests (in Spanish)