Carme Chacón
Spain’s first female defence minister
BORN MARCH 13, 1971 DIED APRIL 9, 2017, AGED 46
AFTER being appointed Spain’s first female defence minister, Carme Chacón one day hoped that she would become her country’s first female prime minister. But it wasn’t meant to be after she narrowly lost a contest to lead the Socialist Party in 2012.
Yet there’s no denying Chacón was a symbol of a new era in Spanish politics under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Born in Catalonia, she attended the University of Barcelona where she gained a law degree and later began her political career as a town hall official.
A member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, she was elected to the Spanish Parliament in 2000 and was made minister of housing in 2007 during Zapatero’s first term.
A year later he appointed her defence minister, a position she held for three years. Despite ruffling feathers in Spain’s traditionally macho society, Chacón quickly silenced her critics by showing a determination to modernise the military and by visiting Spanish troops in Afghanistan, even though she was seven months pregnant.
In 2011, following Zapatero’s crushing defeat in Spain’s general election, she ran to be the head of the Socialist party but narrowly lost out to Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba.
She retreated from front line politics to join a Spanish law firm but remained the party’s secretary for international relations between 2014 and 2016 when she resigned.
As a child Chacón had been diagnosed with a congenital heart condition, something that she acknowledged in 2015 when she told an interviewer her health problems “make me think that every day is a gift”. Sadly, this killed her.
Her marriage to husband Miguel Barroso ended in divorce last year. Their young son survives her.