The Minister of Social Affairs in the last government of Felipe González and former member of the General Council of the Judiciary Cristina Alberdi died this Thursday at the age of 78 in Madrid. Jurist, lawyer, defender of freedoms and fighter for women’s equality – from the political sphere for a long time and always from the legal sphere – Alberdi developed almost her entire personal and professional life in the capital of Spain, although she was born in the town. Sevillian from Los Rosales.
She did not hide her dismay at the situation of the blockage of the General Council of the Judiciary and, although she did not take responsibility away from either of the two major parties, the PP and the PSOE, she did consider that the assessments or reasons put forward by the Popular Party for maintaining the blockage were unjustified. Having been a member of the Council – she was its first female member – she did not assume or accept that its members acted outside of legal correctness and did not understand why the PP had been happy with the election system for many years and now did not. Her distancing from the PSOE, a party she left in 2003, including the delivery of a letter to the then general secretary of the PSOE, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and her profound criticism of important decisions never prevented her from assessing and pointing out what she thought was correct in the actions of the party and the socialist governments. In recent times, the reasons she gave for leaving the PSOE 20 years ago had obvious similarities. His criticism of the current coalition government was directed at the pacts with pro-independence political forces, even though the parties of that ideology are not in the Executive. He never accepted the policies of agreements with ERC from two decades ago, and neither does he accept those of now.
In the PSOE, the party in which she became president of its Madrid organization, they considered her absolutely distant from that family from the moment she left the organization and, above all, due to her involvement in advisory tasks to bodies of the Community of Madrid. at the proposal of the regional government of the PP. If the PSOE saw it as a total break and already considered it linked to the PP, she, the jurist Cristina Alberdi, defended the acceptance of her new tasks under the umbrella of her independence of criteria; reasons impossible for any political party to assume.
She was not a member of the PSOE when, in the midst of the process of drafting the 1978 Constitution, she collaborated on legal aspects of the Fundamental Law. Nor was she a member of the party when she founded the Feminist Legal Collective in Madrid. She was recognised then and now for her legal finesse, reflected in reforms to the Penal and Civil Code.
In her history, she was the first woman to form part of the General Council of the Judiciary, at the proposal of the PSOE, between 1985 and 1990. In 1993, in the last government of Felipe González, she replaced Matilde Fernández in the Ministry of Social Affairs. . It has always been considered that Alberdi had a task that continued the work of Fernández: The first, appointed at the proposal of the then vice president, Alfonso Guerra, and, Alberdi, clearly by Felipe González. The all-out fight between guerristas and felipistas or renovators was in full swing.
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Her membership in the PSOE, with a membership card, began in 1995 and lasted until 2003. The ups and downs and disagreements with the party were notorious, but so was her entire career in defense of women’s rights. The advances that took place at the IV World Conference on Women in Beijing coincided with Spain’s presidency of the EU and it was Alberdi who represented the Europeans in a new milestone in the advancement of these rights.
His last term in Congress, as a representative for Málaga, was in 1996, marked by the defeat of Felipe González after having won every election since 1982. The leadership of the PSOE was already in the hands of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, winner of the primaries against José Bono, Rosa Díez and Matilde Fernández. Alberdi opened another stage in party politics; this time as president of the Madrid PSOE, then called the Madrid Socialist Federation, between 1997 and 2000. But her detachment from the organization increased. In 2003 she left him, including a letter to the general secretary. Rodríguez Zapatero read that the withdrawal of this illustrious activist was due to her disagreement with the agreements that the socialist government had reached with ERC; He also did not understand that, with the call Tinell Pact, the PP was excluded from possible agreements in Catalonia. At that time, Alberdi was an exception within the world of socialist militancy where Zapatero aroused almost absolute support. The rapprochement with the positions of the PP – or their coincidence, as she would say, although not in everything – have coexisted until the end in the intense life of this jurist, heterodox, and always in the front line of the defense of women’s rights, her indisputable legacy.
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