The passing of a political giant
Manuel Hermoso Rojas, former president of the Canary Islands (1993-1999), former mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1979-1991) and ‘alma mater’ of the Agrupación Tinerfeña de Independientes (ATI), has passed away. He was the driving force behind the party that became the seed of the Agrupaciones Independientes de Canarias (AIC) and Coalición Canaria (CC), the political party that has governed the Autonomous Community for the most years—28 in total.
Early life and education
Born in San Cristóbal de La Laguna in 1935, Hermoso himself explained in several interviews that “I was there for barely seven months, according to what I was told, as my parents immediately left for Santa Cruz de Tenerife.” He was the son of Manuel Hermoso Banderas and Amparo Rojas Ortega, both “emigrants from Cártama, a village in Málaga, with the intention of going to America, but they decided to settle” in the capital of Tenerife, as he recounted on several occasions.
In 1953, he moved to Barcelona to study Industrial Engineering, which he completed in Madrid, where he lived in the Colegio Mayor Santa María de Europa. Among his roommates was Rodolfo Martín Villa, one of the main politicians of the Transition who served as Minister of the Interior under former president Adolfo Suárez. During those years, Hermoso’s classmates nicknamed him “El Lord”: “he was the custodian of a suit that my father gave me and that we all wore when we had to go to formal and protocol acts.”
Professional beginnings and return to the islands
When he finished his studies, he did not immediately return to the Islands—”there were not many opportunities for an industrial engineer”—and worked in several companies in Bilbao and Galicia. It was in Vigo where he met and married Asunción Varela, from Orense, in 1961, with whom he had five children.
It was in 1969, when his father’s health deteriorated, that Hermoso decided to return to Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Following his father’s death, he ran the family furniture shop located on the Rambla in the capital of Tenerife. Alongside running the family business, “I organized the canning factory in Lanzarote and set up the Maher prefabricated building factory.”
According to what he said in one of his last interviews, it was this factory that allowed him to get to know all the neighborhoods of Santa Cruz and its people: “It was the same time when the Canary Islands were emigrating and those who were in America were sending money to have a house built for them so they could return; as there were no development plans, there was a lot of anarchy and a lot of self-building, and I visited all the neighborhoods.”
Entry into politics
After the death of dictator Francisco Franco, “a group of ten or fifteen friends who liked democracy and were pro-European” contacted leaders of the PSOE and the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) to “offer to lend a hand, study possibilities, collaborate, but not participate actively in politics.”
It was José Miguel Galván Bello, a UCD leader in Tenerife and at that time president of the Mancomunidad Interinsular de la provincia de Santa Cruz de Tenerife and of the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, who changed these plans: “he told us that people had to get involved, that we had to be politicians and get involved, that half of us should go with him to the Cabildo and the other half with me to the town hall.”
Political success in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
The result of the centrist veteran politician’s vision from Tenerife in the first democratic elections of 1979 is now history: Hermoso won those elections for the UCD—ten councillors—against the Agrupación Libre, the PSOE, the Unión del Pueblo Canario (UPC) and the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), becoming the first post-Francoist mayor of the capital of Tenerife.
This success was repeated as leader of the ATI in 1983 (16 councillors), in 1987, when he reached his zenith with 21 councillors out of the 27 councillors who make up the capital’s council, and in 1991. However, this success in the capital of Tenerife and, by extension, on the island, came with a decade-long burden: it was achieved at the cost of radicalizing the island’s ideology against the government of the ‘progress pact’ presided over by socialist Jerónimo Saavedra (1983-1987) and against the politicians of Gran Canaria.
The path to regional presidency
This ‘Tenerife victimhood’ made it impossible for Hermoso to become president in 1987 because his speeches and those of the ATI, which had managed to bring together the Independent Groupings of the Canary Islands (AIC) in an attempt to regionalize, had invalidated him for the presidency of the Canary Islands. His election night slogan that ‘Tenerife’s time had come’ and his opposition to the creation of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) are two clear examples of that period.
He had to wait until 1993 to recompose his discourse and become president “of all the Canary Islanders” after two years as vice-president of the regional executive in a cabinet in coalition with the PSOE. He achieved this through a motion of censure against Saavedra, his main adversary in 1987—an unusual case in Spain’s still adolescent democracy: the vice-president ‘overthrew’ his president.
A lasting legacy for the Canary Islands
To speak of Manuel Hermoso, who was also a member of Congress for Tenerife (1986) and had a seat in the Parliament of the Canary Islands (1987-1999), is to refer to one of the main architects of the Canary Islands as it is today. The last four decades of political, social and economic evolution of the archipelago and its place within both the Spanish State and the European Union (EU) would be incomprehensible without him. Possibly, even the very existence of the CC would not be such without the leader of modern Canarian nationalism at its helm.
“I hope that in the end I will not be seen as a person who has been aggressive and undesirable, but as a person who has always been a man of consensus, of seeking solutions, because I have always believed that in life what is needed is to be positive,” he confessed to Televisión Canaria in 2019.
