Spanish champion

Alejo Vidal-Quadras has been making a lot of noise about Catalonia

For many Europeans, Alejo Vidal-Quadras was a nobody until last September. Then, overnight, this veteran Spanish politician, and vice-president of the European Parliament, achieved international notoriety by urging military intervention to quell secessionist tendencies in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia. His pronouncement would have had less resonance had it not been for the memories it aroused of a moustachioed lieutenant-colonel in a tricorn hat, holding the entire lower house of the Spanish parliament hostage in 1981. That image of Antonio Tejero with his pistol pointed at the elected government retains its power in Spain, and has acquired almost iconic status around the world as a reminder of the fragility of democracy.

So Vidal-Quadras was touching a sensitive nerve when he called this autumn for a military response to the suggestion from Artur Mas, the nationalist at the head of the Catalan government, of a referendum on full independence. The impact was all the greater since Vidal-Quadras specifically recommended use of the Guardia Civil, the military police that for 40 years had been the backbone of the Franco regime – and of which Tejero had, conspicuously, been an officer. In a country where the ghosts of dictatorship still stalk society even 37 years after the death of the Generalísimo, the idea was profoundly provocative.

The incident provoked controversy, with MEPs comparing Vidal-Quadras to Arab dictators quashing uprisings by force, and the European Parliament inundated with outraged letters and emails. The incident was extreme, but provocation and controversy have been characteristic of much of Vidal-Quadras’ life. Although his Catalonian links are strong – he comes from a Barcelona banking dynasty that included the painter José María Vidal-Quadras, who was linked with Antoni Gaudí and Joan Miró – and although he sometimes styles himself by his Catalan name, as Aleix Vidal-Quadras Roca, he has long been a fierce opponent of centrifugal forces in Spain.

From the early 1980s, he built his political career with Catalan parties linked to Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the former Franco minister who was struggling at the time to build a credible conservative opposition to Felipe González’s socialist government, which was in power for 14 years. In parallel, he was winning distinction as a scientist, with pioneering research into radiation detection and nuclear safety in Spain, France and Ireland that eventually would gain him the chair of atomic and nuclear physics in Barcelona. When he won election to the nationalist-dominated Barcelona city council and Catalan parliament, his combative nature saw him rapidly promoted to the position of spokesman for his centre-right colleagues. With a scientist’s distaste for compromise, Vidal-Quadras mounted ferocious opposition to nationalist tendencies.

In the early 1990s he spearheaded an impatient faction within the centre-right Catalan Partido Popular that rejected the conciliatory approach of the leadership, and advocated head-on confrontation with the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CiU) government led by the nationalist Jordi Pujol. In a bitter internal feud, Vidal-Quadras won support from José María Aznar, the new national chairman of the Partido Popular, and emerged as chairman of the party in Barcelona, and subsequently in the region. He pursued his attack with renewed vigour on the CiU government, which he accused of brainwashing the electorate and of “disrespect for the unwritten rules of democracy”, and practising apartheid in its attempts to displace standard Castilian Spanish with Catalan. Casting himself as the Catalan politician who could defend the central state against the excesses of Catalan nationalism, he ran twice for president of the region, and was rewarded for his unsuccessful efforts with elevation to the national executive committee of the Partido Popular (PP).

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The convictions that propelled him to such heights were eventually the cause of his political defenestration. In 1996 Aznar himself concluded a pact with the CiU, a deal that made him prime minister. Vidal-Quadras resigned from most of his positions in the party. Ever resourceful, he embarked on a new political route: Europe. He became an MEP in 1999, and established a new standing for himself within the party: in the 2009 elections to the European Parliament, he was fourth on the PP list, and from the time he was elected he has been repeatedly endorsed by the party as one of its quota of European Parliament vice-presidents.

On his new trajectory, his engagements – and his approach – have continued to be controversial. He harried the European Commission for publishing news items only in Catalan (“Does the Commission take the view that this information concerns only those Spanish citizens who speak Catalan?”, he asked ironically) and has been adamant in his view that Scotland would have to apply for EU membership if it seceded from the United Kingdom. He is a fierce defender of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. He has played a prominent role in debates on industry, research and energy (France awarded him the Légion d’Honneur for his work on energy dossiers), but has acquired a reputation for scanty consultation with fellow MEPs when leading on dossiers – such as the telecoms package of 2009. He has aroused the ire of conservatives for backing EU moves on reproductive health, and attacks from liberals for criticising the abortion law introduced in Spain by the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

He has also been engaged in efforts to improve the way the EU works and communicates. He was one of the cross-party group that drew up reforms on lobbying and MEPs’ rules of conduct in 2011. And Margot Wallström appreciated his support when she was embattled as European commissioner responsible for communications and inter-institutional relations. But he has been criticised for appointing his wife’s brother to his private office in the Parliament – although he insists he has always acted within the rules.

Fact File

CV

1945: Born, Barcelona

1975: PhD in physics, Autonomous University of Barcelona (AUB)

1984-92: Director of the Radiation Physics Laboratory, AUB

1988-: Professor of atomic and nuclear physics, AUB

1987-91: Member of Barcelona city council

1988-96: Member of Catalan parliament

1991-96: President, Catalan Partido Popular

1993-96: Member, national executive committee Partido Popular

1995-99: Representative of Barcelona in the Spanish Senate

1999-: MEP

1999-: Vice President of the European Parliament

He continues to battle energetically for his view of democracy and better-quality politics in an integrated Spanish state, despite the distractions of his second marriage and an eight-year-old daughter. (She does not speak Catalan “because she has never lived in Barcelona”, unlike his older children from his first marriage, who, he points out proudly, also speak Spnaish, English and French). He has the backing of figures as eminent as Nobel prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and this December he instigated demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona to defend Spain’s constitution and national integrity. His proselytising against “weak consensus” wherever he finds it has expanded from conservative newspapers and political books to social media. A recent blog attacked his own party for political passivity in allowing Aznar to bequeath the leadership to Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s current prime minister. And Arturo Mas, who triggered Vidal-Quadras’ latest controversy, remains under attack even after failing to secure victory in Catalonia’s November elections, despite his call for a referendum. The relentless Vidal-Quadras has only contempt: Mas, he says, is “a man without dignity or honour” for not resigning.