Izaskun Bilbao Barandica

Izaskun Bilbao Barandica
I. Bilbao in 2014
Born	27 March, 1961 Bermeo
Nationality	Spain
Political party	Basque Nationalist Party

Izaskun Bilbao Barandica (born March 27, 1961 in Bermeo) is a politician from the Basque Country, a region in Spain. She was President of the Basque parliament.

Life and career

Isazkun Bilbao was born in the coastal town of Bermeo in the Basque region of north west Spain. She is a member of the Basque Nationalist Party.

President of the Basque Parliament, 2005–2009

Isazkun Bilbao was the President of the Basque Parliament in the 2005-2009 term, being elected to the office as a "consensus candidate" among the nationalist majority in the legislature when the incumbent President and initial candidate of her party, Juan María Atutxa, failed to obtain the majority and the election deadlocked.^[1] She has a degree in Law.

Izaskun Bilbao, the first woman to hold the Presidency of the Basque Parliament

In 2008, she was in the center of a controversy regarding the placement of the Spanish flag in the seat of the Basque Parliament: the Spanish Law on Flags requires that all public institutions place the Spanish flag on a prominent place wherever the regional or local flags fly. After years of not submitting to such law and flying only the Ikurriña (Basque flag), the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that the Basque Parliament would have to fly the Spanish flag too.^[2] In the Bureau meeting that studied the ruling, Izaskun Bilbao sided with the non-nationalist minority in the Parliament ruling body to actually place the flag^[3] against the official policy of her party. She defended this decision as simply obeying the final ruling of the Supreme Court, and thus having nothing to do with politics.

Member of the European Parliament, 2014–present

Isazkun Bilbao has been a Member of the European Parliament since the 2014 European elections. She serves as vice-chairwoman of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group under the leadership of chairman Guy Verhofstadt. She is also a member of the Committee on Transport and Tourism. In this capacity, she has been the parliament’s rapporteur on the interoperability of the rail system within the EU.^[4] In addition to her committee assignments, she is a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on LGBT Rights.^[5]

Isazkun Bilbao has given speeches in the European Parliament in support of freedom of expression in Vietnam and for female entrepreneurship.^[6]

References

1. El Mundo: El Parlamento vasco elige a Izaskun Bilbao (PNV) como presidenta (Spanish)
2. El Mundo: El Supremo ordena que la bandera española ondee en el Parlamento vasco (Spanish)
3. El País: Bilbao ratifica su decisión de colocar la bandera española en la Cámara (Spanish)
4. Izaskun Bilbao Barandica (November 3, 2014), Single railway area key to economic prosperity The Parliament Magazine.
5. Members European Parliament Intergroup on LGBTI Rights.
6. Izaskun Bilbao Barandica plenary speech on European female entrepreneurship, 18 January 2016, ALDEGroup, Retrieved 27 March 2016

External links

• Basque Parliament: Izaskun Bilbao - Bio (Spanish)