Ernest Lluch

Ernest Lluch i Martín (21 January 1937 – 21 November 2000) was a Catalan economist, a historian of economic thought, and a Socialist politician. He was born in Vilassar de Mar, on the Catalonia coast, and was killed in Barcelona at the age of 63. A member of the Socialists' Party of Catalonia, he sat in the Congress of Deputies from 1977 to 1989 and, from 1982 to 1986, was minister of health and consumer affairs in the first government of Felipe González. On the night of 21 November 2000 he was shot in the garage of the building where he lived. No organisation claimed the attack that night, but regional officials blamed ETA, which had called off a ceasefire the previous December.

Lluch earned his licentiate in economics at the University of Barcelona in 1961 and his doctorate there in 1970. He continued his studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, on the nineteenth-century French economic press and its reception in Spain. Under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco he backed a democratic students' union and, in 1966, was expelled from the Barcelona faculty. He then taught at the University of Valencia, where he obtained a chair of economics in 1974, and in the mid-1980s he took the chair of the history of economic doctrines back in Barcelona. Among his books are El pensament econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840) (1973) and La via valenciana (1976), the latter an account of Valencian economic development that diverged from the interpretation Joan Fuster had given in Nosaltres, els valencians.

From 1980 to 1982 he was parliamentary spokesman of the Catalan Socialists in Congress. Royal Decree 3295/1982, of 2 December, appointed him minister of health and consumer affairs in the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party government formed after that autumn's election; the decree appeared in the Boletín Oficial del Estado the next day, under the Spanish form of his name, Ernesto Lluch Martín. The main statute of the term was the General Health Act, Law 14/1986 of 25 April, which set out a National Health System. A standard Catalan reference credits that law with extending social-security health cover to a further five million people. He left the cabinet in 1986. From 1989 to 1995 he was rector of the Menéndez Pelayo International University, a post the university later described as the period in which its Santander campus and the Palacio de la Magdalena were substantially rebuilt.

After the rectorship he returned to the Barcelona chair and to regular columns on politics and the economy. He argued in print that democratic Basque nationalism should enter what he called a constitutional bloc against ETA, and he had recently published research contesting the claim that ETA's first killing was that of a Francoist police inspector. El País reported that, shortly before 10 p.m. on 21 November, he was shot twice in the head in the communal garage at Avenida de Chile 36, and that a neighbour found the body at about 11:30 p.m. A car bomb exploded in a nearby vacant lot; police treated the car as the gunmen's getaway vehicle. The killing fell as Spain was marking twenty-five years since Franco's death.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Ernest Lluch i Martín was born on 21 January 1937 in Vilassar de Mar, during the Spanish Civil War. He came from a modest family of leather and textile artisans. His father, Enric Lluch Casas, kept a workshop in the Ribera neighbourhood of Barcelona that made leather goods, garters and elastic; Joan Esculies, in a biography drawn on archive material and interviews, describes the household as Catalanist and opposed to Francoist Spain. The father wanted his sons in the firm once they left school. Both Ernest and his elder brother, the geographer and editor Enric Lluch i Martín, insisted on university instead, and that refusal left a lasting conflict.

Lluch was schooled in Barcelona, at La Salle de Gràcia, where he practised athletics. For about three years as a young man he travelled as a salesman for the workshop, selling belts, braces, garters and similar goods by train and bus across postwar Spain. Before he was twenty he was already on the road. Letters sent home in 1956, from Burgos on Epiphany and later from Cáceres, described the poverty of Extremaduran towns. Esculies treats that direct contact with people of different origins and conditions as an early training for politics.

Studies in Barcelona and Paris

In 1957 Lluch began economics at the University of Barcelona, a faculty he later called rather dull. He graduated in 1961 in political, economic and commercial sciences with the extraordinary end-of-course prize. Of the teaching, he kept a good memory of Jaume Vicens i Vives, Fabià Estapé and Jordi Nadal. From that year until 1966 he was an assistant in Estapé's seminar on economic policy.

In 1963 a grant for further study took him to Paris, to the École pratique des hautes études of the Sorbonne. There he worked with the historian Pierre Vilar and opened a first doctoral project on the Guillaumin circle around the Journal des Économistes and its influence in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Difficulties with that subject led him to set it aside for an earlier period centred on Catalonia.

Opposition to the Franco regime

As a student in the late 1950s Lluch joined moves to displace the Sindicato Español Universitario, the official and compulsory student union. His first arrest was in 1960, for painting slogans that called for the release of Jordi Pujol. In 1961 he became the first delegate elected democratically in the faculty of economics and was disciplined for it. A profile published when he entered government in 1982 called him the first student delegate chosen democratically at the University of Barcelona since the end of the Civil War.

On 9 March 1966 students and invited academics met, without government authorisation, in the Capuchin convent at Sarrià to found the Sindicat Democràtic d'Estudiants de la Universitat de Barcelona as an alternative to the official union. Police surrounded the building and, on the morning of 11 March, entered and cleared it. The episode, later known as the Caputxinada, was summarised by the Supreme Court as an unauthorised meeting that those inside refused to leave until the police, acting on higher orders, removed them.

Lluch took part, and he was among 69 lecturers who signed a manifesto supporting the students and condemning the police action. The University of Barcelona expelled him in 1966 for siding with the democratic student union; the file, according to the economist Vicent Llombart, was opened and decided by García Valdecasas, Batlle Vázquez and Lora Tamayo. An obituary in El País stated that the expulsion lasted until 1969. The university opened 95 disciplinary files in all, 28 against students and 67 against lecturers, with penalties from fines to removal from the faculty. In 2016 it announced that it would revoke the administrative sanctions imposed on participants and on those who had signed in support.

Academic career

Valencia

After his expulsion from the University of Barcelona in 1966, Ernest Lluch moved his teaching to the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of Valencia. In 1970 the faculty added a fifth-year course in the history of economic doctrines, in the Department of Economic Theory, and he taught it first as an interim profesor agregado. A competition for a permanent post was halted from 1970 to 1973 once the tribunal was expected to vote for him, a delay he later cited as one reason he had not become a catedrático sooner. In 1974 he won the appointment by oposición. A history of the faculty calls him interim agregado until 1974 and catedrático until 1979, and the Diccionari d'historiografia catalana says that he won the chair of economics that year; writing in 1986, he identified the Valencia post as that of profesor agregado.

The post joined the history of economic thought to the economy of the Valencian Community. The same dictionary lists doctrines, development, the Enlightenment, trade and the Valencian economy, including L'estructura econòmica del País Valencià (1970). He was vice-dean under Sánchez Ayuso. His administrative link with Valencia lasted until 1985–86, after his return to parliamentary politics in Catalonia.

The Barcelona chair

In 1980 he rejoined the University of Barcelona as an assistant in economic policy, the subject he had begun under Fabià Estapé. He did not take the automatic promotion then open to agregados. A transitional clause of the 1983 Ley de Reforma Universitaria made them catedráticos; Lluch, like other senior figures in the Socialist administration, declined, and wrote that in 1985 he had renounced a chair the statute had already conferred.

The Generalitat de Catalunya then advertised the chair of the history of economic doctrines at Barcelona. In April 1986, still Minister of Health, he sat the concurso-oposición in Madrid, and the tribunal approved him unanimously. He defended a critical edition, of 570 folios, of a 1780 manuscript of the Real Junta Particular de Comercio de Barcelona, Discurso sobre el comercio, agricultura e industria del principado de Cataluña. The other three candidates withdrew. He said he would have preferred the call to come after the legislature, but that not standing risked losing the university which had expelled him, as a non-tenured teacher, in 1966. In December he wrote that the incompatibilities law left him teaching without salary, by venia docendi. The Fundació Ernest Lluch dates the chair to 1986. The rectorship of the Menéndez Pelayo International University, from 1989 to 1995, took him out of ordinary faculty work.

In the autumn of 1989 he spent several months at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, on the origins of mathematical economics. The institute taught no courses. He called it "a place to think", turned down a year's extension, and planned to return in January for the Menéndez Pelayo.

Teaching, journals, and students

At Valencia a seminar on the history of economic doctrines drew Salvador Almenar, Vicent Llombart, Segundo Bru and Santiago Lanzuela, graduates of the faculty's first class. Almenar later described shared bibliographies, simulated classes and a refusal of doctoral surveys that did not use primary sources, and located Lluch's programme in how economic ideas were diffused and rewritten, not in a search for national precursors. In July 1976 Llombart defended, under Lluch, Pensamiento y teoría de la política económica del conde de Campomanes, before a board that included Francisco Tomás y Valiente, Pedro Schwartz, Josep Fontana and Lluch. Bru had just defended a thesis on Sismondi before the same board. Almenar and Llombart later held Valencia chairs in the field, from 1990 and 1997. In 2001 the faculty, nominating him for a posthumous prize, said that hundreds of students had learned to think as well as to do economics.

In 1970 he co-founded Recerques. Història, Economia, Cultura with Josep Fontana, Ramon Garrabou, Joaquim Molas and Josep Termes, a Barcelona journal tied to no institution and devoted to the modern history, economy and culture of the Catalan-speaking lands, written in Catalan. Part of his 1970 thesis, supervised by Estapé, appeared in the first issue, and he was still on the board of the Associació Recerques elected at the end of 1998. In February 1999, at the Valencia meeting of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, he proposed an Iberian association. It was constituted that December, in the Barcelona faculty, as the Asociación Ibérica de Historia del Pensamiento Económico: no statutes, no permanent officers, and a biennial meeting alternating between Spain and Portugal.

Politics of the Transition

Socialist organizing

Lluch's party work in the Spanish transition to democracy began in the Valencian Community, where he was teaching. An El País profile later dated his membership of the Partit Socialista del País Valencià (PSPV) to 1974. By September 1976 he sat on its collegiate Secretariat with Alfons Cucó and Joan and Vicent Garcés, after four socialist groups had joined that June. The secretariat kept a collective leadership against Vicent Ventura, who wanted a single general secretary and had questioned the party's defence of Valencian catalanitat.

He also represented the PSPV in a coordinating body of socialist parties from Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country. It met in Castelló on 29 February 1976 and again in Maó that June, where Lluch and Cucó were associated with a statement that the three territories reflected the will of each, that Catalan in its variants was their common language, and that it should be official. The same gathering treated talks with the Valencian branch of the Partido Socialista Popular as more promising than talks with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE).

By the spring of 1977 his candidacy was in Catalonia. For the 15 June general election he headed the Girona list of Socialistes de Catalunya, the ticket Joan Reventós presented as Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC-PSOE). In the 1979–82 legislature the congressional roll listed him for the unified Socialists' Party of Catalonia (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya–PSOE), federated with the PSOE but then the sponsor of its own congressional group, Socialistes de Catalunya.

Deputy in Congress

The constituent Congress of Deputies proclaimed Ernesto Lluch Martín elected for Girona, then officially Gerona. He was returned for the same constituency for the PSC-PSOE in the 1979–82 legislature. A later El País profile recorded that, in the constituent Cortes Generales, he took part in the talks on the economic and revenue clauses of Catalonia's statute of autonomy.

For the 1982 general election the PSC national council approved a Barcelona list headed by Raimon Obiols, with Lluch second and Josep Verde i Aldea third; La Vanguardia reported support from nearly 80 per cent of the council. The Congress return lists him as elected for Barcelona. In December 1982 Felipe González named him minister of Health and Consumer Affairs, a post he left in 1986. He sat again for Barcelona in the legislature that opened on 15 July 1986, in the Socialist Parliamentary Group and, from 10 September 1986, on the Economy, Trade and Finance Committee. He resigned the seat on 31 January 1989 and was replaced by Josep Corominas i Busqueta. On 19 January 1989 the Menéndez Pelayo International University had put him on its three-name shortlist for rector.

Spokesman of the Catalan Socialists

In April 1980 the Socialistes de Catalunya group elected him spokesman, a post he held until December 1981. In the May 1980 motion of censure against Adolfo Suárez, he joined Alfonso Guerra and Gregorio Peces-Barba in a meeting with Miquel Roca, spokesman of the Catalan Minority. In the debate he backed the censure, defended González's economic programme and argued that a public deficit was a tool for full employment. The economy minister José Luis Leal and the deputy prime minister Fernando Abril Martorell replied that the proposals would feed inflation and debt and were barely socialist.

The role ended over the bill to harmonise the autonomy process, the LOAPA. The PSC had decided to amend a text the Catalan parliament had censured, if only symbolically. In mid-December 1981 Lluch attended meetings Guerra arranged with the government to head off amendments, then refused Joan Reventós's instruction to table the PSC's own amendments, saying the PSOE had agreed with the Union of the Democratic Centre not to present them. On 20 December the national council withdrew its confidence by 60 votes to 37, with five abstentions. Lluch argued that the spokesman answered to the parliamentary group, not the party, but on 23 December he resigned, hours after telling Spanish national radio that he would not. Eduardo Martín Toval, socialist spokesman in the Parliament of Catalonia, and Joan Prats left the executive in solidarity, and the group entered the recess without a spokesman. Reporting at the time cast Lluch as the contender least likely to succeed Reventós at the May 1982 congress, and as the one most willing to tie the PSC more closely to the PSOE; Obiols was described as the favourite.

Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs

Appointment and the ministry

By Royal Decree 3295/1982 of 2 December, Juan Carlos I, on the proposal of Prime Minister Felipe González, appointed Ernesto Lluch Martín Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs in the first government of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Taking office on 3 December, he said his first step would be to enforce existing rules on doctors' hours and incompatibilities "with all normality and with all rigour." El País later described him as the first economist to hold the post, and wrote that Insalud had no reliable staff count while health spending fell from 3.84 to 3.43 per cent of gross domestic product under Economy Minister Miguel Boyer.

The General Health Act of 1986

The General Health Bill reached the Congress of Deputies only in the last year of the legislature. On 11 June 1985 every opposition group except the centrists asked that it be returned to the government, because it kept financing by employers' and workers' contributions, left free choice of doctor unspecified, and cut into the powers of the autonomous communities. Juan María Bandrés (Euskadiko Ezkerra) called it an impossible pact with medical interests; José Manuel Romay, for the People's Alliance, objected to a larger public sector; and Joaquim Molins (Catalan Minority) missed nationalised finance and universal care. Lluch refused to withdraw it, saying the aim had been "not to create tensions" and that a national health system had been preferred to a privatising model as more effective.

On 31 October Lluch called the project "a radical change in the concept of health." The Socialist rapporteur, Fernando Gimeno, said public care would reach nearly 98 per cent of the population, including people then left to charity, and that psychiatry would move out of asylums. On the night of 7 November the Congress approved the bill against every group but the Socialists; fewer than 200 of 350 deputies were present. Carlos Ruiz Soto, a physician for the Popular group, said the law was "born dead" because it sidelined the medical colleges; Lluch called it "globally accepted."

The Senate passed the text on 27 February 1986 after agreements with the Basque and Catalan nationalists, who withdrew vetoes—the Basque one after González telephoned the lehendakari, José Antonio Ardanza. Vetoes from the Popular group and from the communist senator Rafael Fernández Pinar were rejected. Lluch called the law "complex, but not conflictive." On 18 March the Congress gave final approval. Ruiz Soto, for Coalición Popular, said his group would still not vote for it without a satisfactory right to choose a doctor; the Socialist Marcelo Palacio called the text "widely shared." The same sitting approved an organic law on special public-health measures, with 18 votes against and five abstentions.

The king sanctioned Law 14/1986 of 25 April, the General Health Act (Ley General de Sanidad), published on 29 April 1986 and in force on 19 May. It develops Article 43 of the Constitution of Spain. All Spaniards and resident foreigners are holders of the right to health protection and care, but the preamble says that, because of the economic crisis, free provision would be extended gradually. The National Health System comprises state and regional services. Each community integrates its centres with those of provincial councils and municipalities; an Interterritorial Council chaired by the minister coordinates them. Health areas are generally of 200,000 to 250,000 people, with team-based health centres for primary care. It sets rights to information and written consent, places mental-health care in the community and in general hospitals, and keeps a mix of social security contributions, transfers, fees and regional and local funds rather than taxation alone. El País later put coverage at 94 per cent by the end of the term, including the unemployed, young people up to 26 and the self-employed.

Primary care, medicines, and public health

Royal Decree 137/1984 of 11 January, signed by Lluch, defined health zones, health centres and primary-care teams, discussed with the autonomous communities, and turned pilot family-medicine units into those teams. In July 1983 the ministry announced 50 basic health units that year—half the planned number, cut for legal, financial and premises reasons—and a path to 1986 that officials estimated would convert 23 per cent of primary-care doctors.

On 19 September 1983 the first phase of Prosereme, a selective medicines review, withdrew 111 specialities by 1 October and reformulated 25, affecting 46 companies. The list included amphetamine appetite suppressants, inorganic arsenicals, dihydrostreptomycin, strychnine and clioquinol. By the end of the legislature El País reported 741 specialities annulled and 342 modified. The health act allows products of unproven benefit, or with an equal cheaper alternative, to leave public funding.

In spring 1985 a National Plan on Drugs, under his ministry but involving other departments, treated heroin use as an epidemic; Lluch said hospitals should set aside five to ten beds for users. A later review said the plan still weighted policing above care. After the first legal abortions that August, under the summer's partial decriminalisation in the Criminal Code, he said in Girona that the ministry would monitor every case so the statute did not become what he called a sieve.

Consumer affairs and the end of the term

On 14 March 1983 Lluch said that a consumer law, a sanctions decree and the food code could make 1983 "the year of the consumer in Spain," and acknowledged that the ministry had so far favoured health over consumption. The cabinet approved the bill on 9 November. It gave particular protection to family goods and to children and older people, and covered additives, toxic products, door-to-door food sales and the sanitary register. Law 26/1984 of 19 July, the General Law for the Defence of Consumers and Users, develops Article 51 of the Constitution: safety, economic interests, redress, information, a hearing through associations and legal protection, with the consumer defined as the final recipient. Unlike the health act, it passed in May 1984 with every parliamentary group in favour. El País credited it with labels stating production data and composition, sanctions for health-control breaches, about 60 food-code provisions since January 1983, and 172 new municipal information offices, bringing the total to 386. El País later tied the statute to the aftermath of the 1981 toxic oil syndrome.

After the June 1986 election the cabinet, Lluch included, was ceased by Royal Decree 1195/1986 of 23 June and continued in an acting capacity. Royal Decree 1521/1986 of 25 July appointed Julián García Vargas Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs.

Rector of the Menéndez Pelayo International University

Appointment and programme

The Menéndez Pelayo International University (Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, UIMP), created by decree in August 1932 at the initiative of Fernando de los Ríos, opened its courses in Santander in 1933. From 1982, as an autonomous body of the Ministry of Education, its statutes required the governing board to propose three candidates for a term of four years.

On 19 January 1989 the board proposed Domingo Ynduráin, María del Carmen Iglesias and Ernest Lluch, then 52, professor of the history of economic doctrines at the University of Barcelona and former minister of health in the first government of Felipe González. The next day Royal Decree 70/1989, on a proposal from the education minister Javier Solana, named him rector magnificus, and Royal Decree 68/1989 removed Santiago Roldán, rector since 1983.

Opening the 1989–90 year, Lluch ruled out new centres in Spain and spoke of activity in Santiago de Chile, the United States, France and, from 1991, Mexico City. By 1992 the summer programme had 74 courses and a budget of 1,300 million pesetas, most of it from the government and the rest from private sponsors. Santander's session ran from 15 June to 15 September, with other activity in A Coruña, Seville, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Valencia, Cuenca, Barcelona, Girona and Rome. Lluch framed it around freedom, democracy and economic reformism, and the programme included a seminar on Norberto Bobbio and lectures by Albert O. Hirschman.

On leaving after nearly seven years, he said he had tried to keep party politics out of the institution[] — naming González, Alfonso Guerra, José María Aznar, Jordi Pujol and Julio Anguita as people who had not spoken there — and he linked that choice to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. He singled out the consolidation of the Cuenca centre and the restoration of the Palacio de la Magdalena. On 24 November 1995 the Council of Ministers appointed José Luis García Delgado, professor of applied economics at the Complutense University of Madrid and a UIMP vice-rector from 1983 to 1988. He took office on 28 November, with Lluch present, before the education minister Jerónimo Saavedra.

Santander and later teaching

Summer teaching used the Palacio de la Magdalena, on the Magdalena peninsula in Santander, capital of Cantabria. A summer residence of Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia, it was bought by the city in 1977 from Juan de Borbón for 150 million pesetas.

On 5 July 1989 Enrique Fuentes Quintana opened the courses with a lecture on the economics profession in Spain. Lluch gave Roldán the medal of honour and the title of honorary rector, and Julio Caro Baroja received the Menéndez Pelayo Prize.

In November 1991, after talks with Lluch, the mayor, Manuel Huerta, said the city would borrow 1,000 million pesetas for the palace and the other UIMP buildings, the university paying the interest and the city the principal. In April 1992 the council approved work at that budget, on a design by the architect Luis de la Fuente and with credit from the Banco de Crédito Local, the ministry meeting the interest and the stables to be restored first.

On 14 June 1995 Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía reopened the palace. El País reported spending of more than 5,000 million pesetas and eighteen months of work under De la Fuente, which renewed the services and recovered historic furniture while keeping the early-twentieth-century character. Courses were to open there on 26 June.

Lluch had won the Barcelona chair by competitive examination in May 1986. After leaving the rectorship he returned to the Faculty of Economics, and in 2000 he was still a professor of economic history at the University of Barcelona.

Writings

Catalan economic thought

Lluch's main scholarly work was a history of how economic ideas were selected and recast in Catalonia. The thesis he defended in 1970 at the University of Barcelona, under Fabià Estapé, was El pensamiento económico en Cataluña entre el renacimiento económico y la revolución industrial: la irrupción de la escuela clásica y la respuesta proteccionista. A shorter and heavily revised Catalan text appeared in 1973 with Edicions 62 as El pensament econòmic a Catalunya (1760–1840). Els orígens ideològics del proteccionisme i la presa de consciència de la burgesia catalana.

The book divided Catalan economic ideology into three phases—conflict with agrarian mercantilism (1760–1790), a distinctive "prohibitionist industrialism" (1790–1814), and an adjustment after 1815 to wider freedom that kept the earlier paradigm—and reconstructed a local preference for prohibition, internal trade, modern agronomy and reformed guilds. Pablo Cervera Ferri has described this as a "national history of economic thought": how ideas were transmitted and adapted in a relatively backward economy, not a hunt for precursors. Part of the thesis appeared in 1970 in the first issue of Recerques, which Lluch founded. He later prefaced a 1989 edition of Francesc Romà i Rossell's Las señales de la felicidad de España and, with Salvador Almenar, surveyed the spread of classical economics in Spain.

Valencia and industrialisation

The Diccionari d'historiografia catalana lists L'estructura econòmica del País Valencià (1970) and La via valenciana (1976), winner of the 1975 Premi Joan Fuster d'assaig. The essays ask why the region remained outside the first Industrial Revolution, including the decline of eighteenth-century silk; why dominant financial groups resisted industry from the Bourbon Restoration to the Civil War; and how an industrialisation took hold after 1959, once early Francoist autarky ended.

The book contradicted Joan Fuster's reading, in Nosaltres, els valencians, of a society held back by agrarianism, and the claim that industry began with Ford at Almussafes and the projected steelworks at Sagunt. Lluch traced instead an older industry, often grown from local crafts and organised in modest firms making simple consumer goods, and he pointed to Emilia-Romagna, not industrial Lombardy or the Italian south, as the comparison. Llombart called the criticism of Fuster respectful, and noted the reissue by Editorial Afers, with a prologue and epilogue by Vicent Soler, a student of Lluch's at the University of Valencia. Soler has said that former students who became consellers in the 1980s drew on it for innovation and competitive strategy, and a later discussion links the essays to the technological institutes the Generalitat then created.

The eighteenth century

His later research moved back toward the War of the Spanish Succession and what he called a persistent austracism in the Crown of Aragon. Acaecimientos de Manuel Belgrano, fisiócrata (Madrid, 1984) presented Manuel Belgrano as a translator of Quesnay who carried physiocracy into Spanish-speaking America. With Lluís Argemí he published Agronomía y fisiocracia en España (Valencia, Institución Alfonso el Magnánimo, 1985), whose balance a reviewer described as a timid penetration of physiocracy. Later accounts call that influence fragile, mostly a matter of the new agronomy and legal despotism, and place cameralism at the centre of his map of diffusion beyond the German world.

La Catalunya vençuda del segle XVIII (1996) and Las Españas vencidas del siglo XVIII. Claroscuros de la Ilustración (Crítica, Barcelona, 1999, 252 pages) are two versions of one project on the Enlightenment after 1714, not a straight translation. Lluch argued that thought in the old Crown of Aragon was earlier, more industrial than agrarian, and more liberal than interventionist, by comparison with the Enlightenment he called Asturian-Castilian, and he connected the memory of those "defeated Spains" with the territorial clauses of the 1978 Constitution. He followed an austracist composite monarchy from the Viennese exile and Juan Amor de Soria through the Count of Aranda to a Catalan project of the 1780s around Antonio de Capmany. In Revista de Libros that December, Miguel Herrero de Miñón praised the erudition and the account of Spanish "politerritoriality", while Pablo Fernández Albaladejo called it a remodelled compilation reviving a territorial "two Spains", and described its author as caught between radical Catalan nationalism and Asturian-Castilian unitarism. His last book, L'alternativa catalana (1700–1714–1740) (Eumo, 2000), followed Ramon de Vilana Perlas and Amor de Soria's case for regular Cortes and a fiscal balance between Castile and Aragon. Reviewing it, Jaume de Puig i Oliver noted a hypothesis, already raised by Josep Fontana, that Crown of Aragon institutions might have evolved on English or Dutch lines rather than as a medieval relic against Bourbon centralisation.

Journalism

From 1959 he wrote for Serra d'Or and Promos; in the 1960s, Manuel Ibáñez Escofet said, he set the economic line of Tele/eXprés and El Correo Catalán through contributors known as the "lluchets". La Vanguardia dates pieces to 27 April 1962 and 19 May 1967 and calls him a regular signature from the early 1980s, apart from his years as minister, on Catalan, Valencian and Aragonese history, Catalonia–Spain finance, and schools of economics. A bibliography by Núria Comas, Montserrat Galera and Eugeni Giral, using files from La Vanguardia and El País, lists 76 monographs, 180 contributions to collective volumes, 357 journal articles and 1,406 newspaper pieces, and says the count was not closed.

The Basque question

Dialogue and constitutional nationalism

From 1995 Lluch spent long periods in San Sebastián, where he advised, unpaid, the socialist mayor Odón Elorza. He joined Elkarri, a dialogue platform of nationalist inspiration, and sought to end violence in the Basque Country by drawing the Basque Nationalist Party into the constitutional framework while Juan José Ibarretxe’s sovereignty line confronted José María Aznar.

On 3 June 1999, during ETA’s truce, he spoke for Elorza in the Plaza de la Constitución as Euskal Herritarrok supporters demanded that prisoners be moved closer to the Basque Country. He answered that those now shouting had previously killed, and told them to go on shouting “because while you shout you will not kill.”

With Miguel Herrero de Miñón, a conservative drafter of the 1978 Constitution, he published “Ideas concretas para la paz” in El País on 18 September 1999. They asked for a wider transfer of prisoners under ordinary penitentiary law, described as politics for peace rather than a political price, and, under point 10 of the Ajuria Enea agreement, for talks between the state and those abandoning violence and among the parties, with the last word left to the Basque electorate. For territory they cited cooperation with Navarre, already in the Statute of Gernika and the Navarrese Amejoramiento, and cross-border links with the French Basque Country. The instrument they stressed was the additional provision of the Constitution of Spain on historical rights: revising the Statute would open a pact, and “whoever pacts, self-determines,” without a new constituent period. ETA ended the truce within weeks and the text was not taken up. Herrero later denied that this was a third way outside the Constitution and called it “useful constitutionalism.”

Historical research and public controversy

With historians at the University of the Basque Country, among them Jon Arrieta and Jesús Astigarraga, Lluch and Herrero directed courses in 1997 and 1998 on historical rights. Papers from the courses, first issued by the BBV Foundation, were collected under their editorship as Derechos históricos y constitucionalismo útil (Crítica, 2002).

In El Correo on 19 September 2000, “La primera víctima de ETA,” Lluch argued that the organisation’s first killing was not the Civil Guard José Antonio Pardines in 1968, or the policeman Melitón Manzanas, but the toddler Begoña Urroz, who died on 28 June 1960 after a bomb at Amara station. He drew on a 1992 note by the vicar José Antonio Pagola and on the family, while recording that he had found no ETA claim and that United Press had attributed the bombs to the Directorio Revolucionario Ibérico de Liberación (DRIL); he read the silence as deliberate. In La Vanguardia on 19 October, “El pecado original de ETA,” he denied any morally exempt early phase, wrote that he stood “much further” from ETA than from Spanish nationalism, and said he would not stop until non-violent Basque nationalism entered the constitutional bloc “through the formula of historical rights or any other kind of negotiation.” The piece received the 2000 Godó journalism prize.

A 2019 report of the Centro Memorial de las Víctimas del Terrorismo, by Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla and Manuel Aguilar, found no evidence of ETA’s involvement and recorded a DRIL claim in the Caracas paper El Nacional; the authors traced the later ETA attribution largely to Lluch’s articles.

On 29 August 2000 he attended, as a member of the honour committee, a homage at the Irun bridge to Lluís Companys on the sixtieth anniversary of the Republican president’s handover by Nazi police. The People’s Party and Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds objected to two Euskal Herritarrok names on the committee, and the Catalan Socialists sent no official representative; Lluch minimised that absence. The same day’s killing by ETA of Manuel Indiano, a People’s Party councillor in Zumarraga, overshadowed the ceremony.

Assassination

The attack of 21 November 2000

On the evening of 21 November 2000 Ernest Lluch was shot dead in the garage of 36 Avinguda de Xile, the Barcelona building where he lived. El País reported that two shots hit him in the head, one through the chin and the skull, and that he died at once; a neighbour found the body, between two cars, at about 23:30. The paper put the shooting a few minutes before 22:00. At 21:55 a white Ford Escort with duplicated plates exploded in a vacant lot about 50 metres away. Police read it as a getaway car destroyed to erase evidence, while also allowing that it might have been meant for another target or might have gone off by accident. The agencies reported no injuries from the blast. No group claimed the killing that night, but officials in Catalonia described it as the hallmark of ETA, which had ended a 14-month ceasefire in December 1999 and had been blamed for about 20 deaths that year.

ETA assumed the attack only later, and gave a reason. On 15 January 2001 ABC reported that Gara had published the group's December bulletin Zutabe. The text said Lluch was killed because he "was set on tightening ties between the PSOE and the PNV in order to drag the latter into decided collaboration with the state", and called him a "member of the government of the GAL" who had played the "good cop" while favouring "a supposed dialogue". On 19 January a communiqué claimed 16 attacks, including the deaths of Lluch, People's Party councillor Francisco Cano Consuegra and urban guard Juan Miguel Gervilla, and threatened the signatories of the PSOE–PP antiterrorist pact and anyone who joined it later.

Political response

On 23 November a largely silent march along Passeig de Gràcia, from Carrer d'Aragó to Plaça de Catalunya, drew a municipal-police estimate of 900,000 people; El País wrote of nearly a million. The lead banner read, in Catalan, "Catalonia for peace. ETA, no."

Prime Minister José María Aznar walked with PSOE secretary-general José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Jordi Pujol, president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe and mayor Joan Clos. Aznar and Ibarretxe, together in a demonstration for the first time in five months, did not speak. Lluch's partner Montserrat Lamarca and daughters Rosa, Mireia and Eulàlia refused the front rank beside Aznar and Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja, telling the Socialists' Party of Catalonia that this would betray his defence of dialogue in the Basque Country, and later held up a placard reading "Dialogue now". Gemma Nierga, reading the agreed manifesto, added a line that was not in it: "Those of you who can, talk to each other." Alberto Fernández Díaz, the PP leader in Catalonia, answered that one could not "talk to those who use weapons".

That night the government spokesman Pío Cabanillas called the killing "horrible, absolutely shocking". Pujol said Lluch may have been chosen because he spoke "in a very clear and concise way against terrorism". Pasqual Maragall called him "a friend of the Basque people" and the first former minister ETA had killed. On 12 December Aznar, Zapatero and Javier Arenas signed the Agreement for Freedoms and against Terrorism at La Moncloa. Its preamble barred alliances with the PNV and Eusko Alkartasuna until they formally left the Lizarra agreement, and Convergence and Union and United Left stayed out over that text. El País noted that ETA had killed 21 people since breaking its truce.

Trial of the Barcelona commando

The Audiencia Nacional tried the case in Madrid in early July 2002. Prosecutors sought 54 years each for José Ignacio Krutxaga, Lierni Armendariz and Fernando García Jodra, for the murder, the damage from the explosion, theft of a vehicle and falsified documents, plus 464,593 euros for the heirs. Lamarca did not join the private prosecution; the report said she held that her husband had trusted the public action to see justice done.

On 18 July each received 33 years for murder, robbery and document falsification, with a joint payment of 464,593 euros to the heirs and 2,001.37 euros to the owner of the stolen car. The facts held proved differed from the first reports. Krutxaga and García Jodra waited in the garage while Armendariz watched from a vehicle; at about 21:30 Krutxaga shot Lluch twice at very close range; they fled in a stolen Ford Fiesta, destroyed it with an incendiary device, and left in Armendariz's car. The court said there was no direct proof they had been there, and cited indications including the pistol Krutxaga was carrying when arrested. Police reported on 12 January 2001 that an HS 9mm seized from him the day before — under the name José Ignacio Cruchaga — was the gun used on Lluch; that coverage called his companion Liarni Armendáriz.

In court all three said they were proud members of ETA and assumed every action of the organization, but would not discuss the killing. Krutxaga refused to confirm a police statement in which he had admitted his part, alleging ill-treatment, and said that if Lluch was a target it was as a Socialist and former minister who, he claimed, had backed the GAL, torture and the dispersal of prisoners. The three were removed after a disturbance while an officer Armendariz accused of torture was giving evidence.

Legacy

Memorials and the foundation

On 21 January 2002, the day Lluch would have turned 65, relatives and colleagues constituted the Fundació Ernest Lluch at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Barcelona. Felipe González, Pasqual Maragall and Odón Elorza were among the founders; Fabià Estapé was chosen to preside over the board, and the statutes were approved that day. Its offices are in the Biblioteca Ernest Lluch in Vilassar de Mar. It awards a research bursary—the fourteenth call was in 2025—and, with the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University, a prize for the best upper-secondary project in the social and political sciences, in a twenty-first edition in 2026.

On 25 July 2021 Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona opened Ernest Lluch station on line 5, between Collblanc and Pubilla Cases on the boundary of Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, with an interchange to Trambaix lines T1, T2 and T3. In Calatayud he had inaugurated, on 27 May 1985, the comarcal hospital then serving more than 55,000 people in the surrounding districts; the Government of Aragon gave it his name in 2002. He was the first president of the Fundación Río Tinto from 1987 to 1991. On 3 May 2001, after his murder by ETA, the mining museum in the former company hospital at Minas de Riotinto, and the square before it, were named for him: the Riotinto Mining Museum.

Assessment

An El País editorial of 31 March 1986, “Un fracaso del Gobierno”, treated the General Health Act as a lost chance of thorough reform. Concessions to the medical corporations, above all the Organización Médica Colegial, had in its view mixed a national health service with a more liberal model—free choice of doctor, two classes of autonomous community, an Insalud left in place—and had made universal coverage only a progressive extension.

Félix Lobo, a collaborator in the ministry from 1982 and later at the Menéndez Pelayo International University, described that gradualism as what got the law through. Writing in the Revista Española de Salud Pública, he said Lluch coined “Spanish National Health System” because a single service could not fit management by the autonomous communities: article 3 stated universalisation and the fifth transitional provision made it a process. Coverage, he recorded, then reached 93.4 per cent, the shift from social-security contributions to general taxation was completed only in 1999, and the Interterritorial Council’s coordination remained weak, a gap he said COVID-19 confirmed. At the fortieth anniversary of the Act of 25 April 1986, El País found the principles—citizenship rather than employment, tax finance, universality, equity—still widely defended, and the operation widely faulted. Rafael Bengoa called the tax-funded model, not social insurance, the strategic choice; Vicente Ortún and José Ramón Repullo said it need not be rebuilt, but that rigid management, waiting lists and delays in primary care had left it working badly.

Joan Esculies’s Ernest Lluch. Biografia d’un intel·lectual agitador (La Magrana, 2018; 461 pages) won the seventeenth Gaziel Prize, from RBA and the Fundació Conde de Barcelona. A jury including Borja de Riquer and Anna Caballé stressed his historical weight; the prize note cited unpublished interviews and a harder picture, with a ministerial term ending in distance from González and a later attempt to engage the Basque conflict. Jordi Amat called it a reconstruction from archives, the press and interviews: the health law, a pillar of the welfare state, cost Lluch the next cabinet in González’s view, and the research on Catalan and Spanish modernity was an alternative constitutional history aimed at the territorial system and Basque violence.

In December 1999 Miguel Herrero de Miñón reviewed Las Españas vencidas del siglo XVIII. Claroscuros de la Ilustración (Crítica, 252 pages), the Spanish version of an earlier Catalan book, as difficult—built from partial studies “not fully integrated”—and dense in first-hand erudition. He set out Lluch’s contrast between a more industrial Catalan-Aragonese Enlightenment and an Asturian-Castilian one, and the link drawn between foral pluralism and the territorial clauses of the 1978 Constitution.