Xosé Manuel Beiras

Xosé Manuel Beiras Torrado (7 April 1936 – 8 October 2026) was an economist, university professor, writer and left-wing nationalist politician from Galicia. Born in Santiago de Compostela, he moved from clandestine opposition to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco into a long career as the best-known voice of Galician nationalism in the autonomous parliament.

He studied law at the University of Santiago de Compostela, then economics and French literature in Paris and economics at the London School of Economics. He joined the Santiago faculty in 1968, became a full professor of economic structure in 1980, and was later named professor emeritus; he also served as dean of the economics faculty. His 1972 essay O atraso económico de Galicia treated Galicia’s underdevelopment as a structural relationship of dependence and became a standard text for later nationalist and left-wing argument about the Galician economy.

Beiras was a founding member of the Partido Socialista Galego in 1963 and its secretary general from 1971 until 1977, when he headed its unsuccessful list in A Coruña in the first parliamentary elections after Franco. From the constitution of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego in 1982 he was its national spokesperson and, from 1985, a deputy in the Parliament of Galicia, at first its only one. Between 1985 and 1997 the BNG grew from that single seat to 18 and overtook the Socialists as the principal opposition to Manuel Fraga, who governed the Xunta de Galicia for the People's Party. In 1993 he struck his desk with a shoe to protest an electoral change passed by Fraga’s absolute majority, a gesture that came to stand for his theatrical style of opposition.

He was pushed out of the BNG spokespersonship in the early 2000s and left the party in January 2012, after criticizing the 2005–2009 coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the BNG. He then founded Anova–Irmandade Nacionalista and led Alternativa Galega de Esquerda with Esquerda Unida, whose Galician organization was headed by Yolanda Díaz; the list won nine seats in 2012. Pablo Iglesias Turrión later said that Podemos would probably not have been possible without him, and the broader ticket En Marea grew out of that alliance before breaking up. As AGE spokesperson he confronted Fraga’s successor Alberto Núñez Feijóo in 2013 over photographs of Feijóo with the convicted drug trafficker Marcial Dorado, and struck Feijóo’s bench. Beiras left parliament in 2016. In 2024 he campaigned for the BNG candidate Ana Pontón, twelve years after the split.

Beiras died in the early hours of 8 October 2026 at A Reboraina de Aguiar, his stone house on the outskirts of Santiago, aged 90. His two sons arranged a public farewell the next day at the Museo do Pobo Galego. Messages came from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Xunta president Alfonso Rueda, Pontón, Díaz and Iglesias.

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Xosé Manuel Beiras Torrado was born in Santiago de Compostela on 7 April 1936; he later said that he had been born with the Popular Front. He was the eldest of nine children of Manuel Beiras García, a merchant and agent for a haberdashery warehouse who had no university degree, and Herminia Torrado, who had studied the piano. Manuel Beiras had belonged to the Partido Galeguista in the Second Spanish Republic and in 1935 joined the small split Dereita Galeguista; after the Spanish Civil War, unlike some of that group, he stayed outside Francoism, in a household of republican Galician nationalism.

The family lived at Rúa do Vilar 11 until he was eleven, then moved to the Rosaleda. Beiras later described prints from Castelao's album Nós, a Galician-language library drawn largely from Ánxel Casal's publishing house Nós, and Sundays on which his mother played the piano while his father read Rosalía de Castro, Eduardo Pondal and popular ballads. He learned to read at four from María Luísa, a teacher and family friend; his father then taught him Galician history and the Rexurdimento, so that he read Galician and Spanish almost together. At five he began solfège with Amadora Martínez Sieiro and continued the piano at the elementary conservatory of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País through the sixth course, at twelve. Visitors included Ramón Otero Pedrayo, Fermín Bouza-Brey, Francisco Fernández del Riego, Ricardo Carvalho Calero and Cruz Gallástegui, and the children went to the Rosalía masses at Bonaval. An uncle, the ophthalmologist Antón Beiras, stood for a more openly left-wing nationalism.

In 1943, when Beiras was seven, his father and other liberal parents hired Xesús Pereira Vilariño so that their sons would avoid both the Francoist state schools and the clerical colleges. Pereira, who had taught in Vedra during the Republic, was imprisoned in Santiago after the 1936 coup and barred from public teaching for eighteen years; Beiras called him a purged republican who had come close to being summarily killed, and still spoke of him with devotion decades later. The Preceptoría San José opened that year in the Patio de Madres with eight pupils, Beiras among them. He later called it an oasis and an attempt, under the dictatorship, at the active methods of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza: reading, classical texts, writing, excursions and sport. The class moved to the Rúa Nova and then to Xeneral Pardiñas; from 1951 it was linked to Manuel Peleteiro's Academia Minerva, which took the bachillerato.

Studies in Santiago, Paris and London

Beiras entered the University of Santiago de Compostela at sixteen, in 1952, to read law. He later said that he had wanted economics in Madrid, but that the family could not keep its eldest son away from home. As a student he joined the circle around Ramón Piñeiro and Editorial Galaxia, which the journalist Borobó called "La Generación de la Noche" and which included Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Xosé Luís Franco Grande and Xohana Torres. Beiras wrote concert notes for the Asociación Filarmónica de Compostela rather than fiction.

The year of the degree is disputed. In 2025 he said that he finished law at twenty-one and reached Paris in 1957 on a Galaxia grant; elDiario.es gives 1957 for both. RTVE's obituary dates the licenciatura to 1958. He placed that first stay at the end of the French Fourth Republic and the return in the summer of 1959.

He did not enrol for an economics degree. He took selected courses — economic systems with André Marchal and cooperation with Georges Lasserre — and French language and literature at the Sorbonne, which he said mattered at least as much; RTVE states that he matriculated in the faculty of law and economic sciences and in French there. The stay brought contact with the movement in Brittany, the bouquinistes and Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, and Faro de Vigo reported that he sometimes tried to sit near Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He began writing for the Revista de Economía de Galicia, a direction he traced to Gallástegui. He called his younger self "a progressive liberal, very moderate, radical only in my antifascism", still shaped by Piñeiro, and said that Paris, with the wars in Indochina and Algeria behind it, made much of that formation look conservative. Those years also included his first trips to London, where Ramón "Moncho" Lugrís lived and worked at the BBC.

RTVE states that he later extended his economics at the London School of Economics, without a year, and that in the mid-1960s a Fundación March grant paid for advanced study at the Institut de Science Économique Appliquée, again in Paris. In 2025 he said that what he had learned from François Perroux included the ideas of an agro-industrial and a maritime-industrial complex. He returned to live in Galicia in 1968.

Academic career and economic thought

The University of Santiago

Beiras's university career was centred on the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he began a law degree in 1952 and graduated in 1958. He then studied law and economics, and French language and literature, at the University of Paris, continued in economics at the London School of Economics, and in the mid-1960s held a Fundación March grant at the Institut de Science Économique Appliquée in Paris. In 1965 he defended Contribución al estudio socioeconómico de la demografía de Galicia at the University of Seville, directed by Jesús Prados Arrarte. From 1963 to 1968 he in practice edited the Revista de Economía de Galicia, formally directed by Xaime Isla Couto at Editorial Galaxia, until a fine from the Franco regime's press authorities, over a shellfish editorial, preceded its closure.

He taught political economy in the law faculty in 1964–65 and, when the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences opened in 1968, joined it as professor of economic structure and institutions, the post RTVE links to his definitive return to Galicia. In a 2022 laudatio the faculty economist Xavier Vence dated the chair of economic structure to 1970, named him department director for more than ten years and dean briefly in 1972, during student and labour unrest, and again from 1982 to 1984, and noted teaching in communication and in political and social sciences. RTVE's 2026 obituary instead dates that chair to 1980 and calls him emeritus; the university's emeritus roll lists José Manuel Beiras Torrado. Vence treated daily use of Galician in class, research and administration as a mark of that record. On 21 September 2022 the rector, Antonio López, gave him the Luis Porteiro Garea prize; Beiras said that, four decades after the Statute of Autonomy, defence of the language still depended mainly on civil society.

O atraso económico de Galicia

O atraso económico de Galicia was published by Editorial Galaxia in Vigo in 1972. The Xunta's Enciclopedia Galega Universal presents it as a theory of "atraso": change without matching development left a dependent economy, behind neighbouring countries in productivity, income per head, consumption and the share of the working population. Rural exodus, demographic decline, agrarian crisis, proletarianisation and ecological damage belonged to that picture. Secular emigration, a stunted bourgeoisie, institutional insolidarity and financial colonisation were causes; minifundism, poor communications and weak entrepreneurship were symptoms.

Later notices do not fix one date or title. elDiario.es and Nós Diario date O atraso económico de Galiza, or da Galiza, to 1973 and read it as a centre–periphery use of dependency theory. elDiario.es adds that Beiras was by then a Marxist who rejected orthodoxy—syncretic and undogmatic, "a sort of socialist without a surname." An earlier monograph had already set the rural terms. El problema del desarrollo en la Galicia rural (Galaxia, Vigo, 1967, 226 pages) won the research prize of the Casa de Galicia in New York, which RTVE dates to 1966. A 1969 Tiers-Monde review reported that he adopted Werner Sombart, as developed by François Perroux, over schemes he associated with Marx and Walter Eucken, and described rural Galicia as precapitalist, feudal and artisanal: closed and "colonial," yet communal, with a stability he blamed on institutions.

Faro de Vigo argued in 2022 that the essay split Galician economic and political thought in two, late in the dictatorship and just before the first oil crisis, and set it beside Castelao's Sempre en Galiza. Next to Valentín Paz-Andrade's Galicia como tarea (1959) and La marginación de Galicia (1972), it located the novelty in the actors: flight of savings, emigration as a "renunciation of revolt," a peasantry and a language called medieval but still the necessary starting point, and a petty bourgeoisie that had missed a liberal revolution and supported the central power. The urban economy, Beiras wrote, pressed in "the most corrosive forms" on a precapitalist peasantry—internal colonialism—while the basic dependence was on the Spanish economy, a frame Faro tied to González Casanova, Furtado, dos Santos, Lafont and Frantz Fanon.

The book was argued over, not only adopted. The Xunta encyclopaedia says later economic writing and political discourse both confirmed and rebutted it. In 1982 Galaxia reissued the essay and Ediciós do Castro published O atraso e nós. Xan López Facal called the original inaugural but also a door onto difficult, ambiguous paths. Emilio Pérez Touriño—printed there as Emilio López Touriño—then a Communist militant and later a socialist president of the Xunta, allowed the analytical effort only as a starting point: he denied that twentieth-century Galician agriculture was precapitalist, rejected a rural–urban dual society, and held Lafont's internal colonialism inapplicable, preferring class conflict across nations. In a 2020 Laiovento edition, O atraso económico da Galiza, Beiras himself asked whether the syndrome of backwardness was past while the condition remained, and whether Galicia had merely exchanged an internal colony's place in Spanish capitalism for one vis-à-vis the European Union. Laiovento had already issued a revised edition in 1997.

Later books and translations

Further books kept economics and politics together. Dialnet lists Por unha Galicia liberada: ensaios en economía e política; elDiario.es cites it as Por unha Galiza liberada (1984), with Prosas de combate e maldicer (1991) and O Estado da Nación (1996). Laiovento published Exhortación á desobediencia (2013), which Beiras called a call to disobey the Spanish and Galician regimes after the Prestige disaster and Nunca Máis, and O proxecto común da nación galega (2016). He contributed to the collective A Galicia rural na encrucillada (Galaxia, Vigo, 1975); RTVE calls him a co-author and dates it 1976.

Translation ran beside the economics. With Xosé Luís Franco Grande he put Jean Anouilh's Antigone into Galician, and Nós Diario also credits him with Galician versions of Albert Camus's Les Justes and Letters to a German Friend, and of Anne Philipe's Le temps d'un soupir (O tempo dun salaio). elDiario.es describes a later return to that work—Camus's Catro cartas a un amigo alemán, Benjamin Constant's Adolphe and Edgar Morin's Espertemos!—and links the economic writing to a non-orthodox Marxism which, in the 2000s, drew on Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi and on a critique of neoliberal globalisation that Beiras preferred to call altermundialism.

The Galician Socialist Party

Founding and clandestine activity

The Partido Socialista Galego (PSG) was founded clandestinely in A Coruña on 23 August 1963, under Francisco Franco. The Enciclopedia Galega Universal names Cesáreo Saco López, Mario Orjales Pita and Xosé Luís Rodríguez Pardo as its founders, and records that Ramón Piñeiro attended only the founding meeting. The first members mixed veterans of the Partido Galeguista, including Francisco F. del Riego, the first secretary general, and L. Viñas Cortegoso, with younger university figures: Beiras, Ramón Lugrís Pérez and Fernando Pérez Barreiro.

It took shape in the culturalist circle of Editorial Galaxia. Daniel Salgado has described it as what survived of a Piñeiro plan for underground galeguista versions of Western Europe's social-democratic and Christian-democratic parties; the Christian-democratic project did not take hold. Millán Fernández, reported by elDiario.es, calls the early PSG social-democratic and Europeanist, a bridge from pre-war galeguismo to Marxist nationalism, and credits Beiras's reading of Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon and Robert Lafont with turning it socialist by the late 1960s. The Galician encyclopedia, which summarizes the programme as Marxism, federalism, socialism and democracy, dates his term as secretary general to 1971–1977 and an internal reorganization to 1973; La Voz de Galicia dates that clandestine leadership from 1970.

The PSG remained a cadre party. It worked with the Unión do Povo Galego (UPG), founded in 1964 by, among others, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín and Celso Emilio Ferreiro. Through the early 1970s the alliance was relatively stable. Both currents used theories of internal colonialism, for which Beiras's 1972 essay O atraso económico de Galicia became a reference.

The Transition and the 1977 election

In 1974 the PSG entered the Conferencia Socialista Ibérica, convened by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) with Socialist International support, with the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya, the Partit Socialista del País Valencià and the Unión Sindical Obrera. After meetings in Paris and Münstereifel, the PSOE left in March 1975, following its Suresnes congress; the PSG stayed, and that April the conference called for a democratic break, self-determination and a federal or confederal republic. The PSG also joined the 1975 founding, in Viana do Castelo, of the UPG-led Asemblea Nacional-Popular Galega. In April 1976 sectors from the PSG orbit, demanding more pluralism, left as the Asamblea Popular Galega; in April 1977 the assembly and the UPG created the Bloque Nacional-Popular Galego (BNPG) for the elections.

From 5 January 1976 the PSG, the UPG and the Partido Galego Social-Demócrata made up the Consello de Forzas Políticas Galegas, later joined by the assembly, the Galician Carlists and the Movemento Comunista de Galicia. The council affirmed Galicia's right of self-determination and a rupture with Francoism, then dissolved in November 1976, when the UPG refused the communist movement unless its cadres left Comisiones Obreras for the Sindicato Obreiro Galego.

The PSG also refused absorption into the PSOE, which was being rebuilt inside Spain with German social-democratic support and was distancing itself from the communists. On 15 June 1977, the first general election since 1936, it stood alone, with Beiras heading the list in A Coruña. It won 27,197 votes — 0.15 percent in Spain and 2.4 percent in Galicia — and no seats in the Congress of Deputies. The provincial totals were 16,660 in A Coruña (3.7 percent, and sixth place), 5,999 in Pontevedra, 2,458 in Ourense and 2,080 in Lugo. In Galicia the Union of the Democratic Centre took 53.7 percent, the PSOE — listed in that series as the Socialists of Galicia–PSOE — 15.5 percent, the People's Alliance 13.1 percent, Enrique Tierno Galván's Popular Socialist Party 4.7 percent, the Communist Party of Spain 3.0 percent and the BNPG 2.0 percent.

El Progreso has reported that, before the vote, Beiras turned down an offer to control a Galician socialist federation linked to the PSOE. The defeat broke the party. Cadres including Fernando González Laxe, third on the A Coruña list and later president of the Xunta, Xosé Luís Rodríguez Pardo and Ceferino Díaz joined Felipe González's PSOE. In 1978 that current helped found the Partido dos Socialistas de Galicia–PSOE (PSdeG–PSOE), the Galician organization of the Spanish socialist party and not a continuation of the 1963 PSG. Other sectors joined Esquerda Galega, forming PSG–Esquerda Galega in 1982, or entered the Galician Nationalist Bloc.

Beiras left the secretariat. In A estrela na palabra he called the years that followed "unos años terribles, un itinerario infernal por los laberintos de mi subconsciente", and said he did not come out of the depression until the end of 1981. In A nación incesante he named the episode his "baixada aos infernos". He returned to organized politics in 1982 as a co-founder of the BNG.

The Galician Nationalist Bloc

Foundation and entry into parliament

The Galician Nationalist Bloc (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, BNG) was founded on 25 and 26 September 1982 at the Riazor fronton in A Coruña. A managing board formed that May in Santiago de Compostela joined the communist Unión do Povo Galego (UPG), its Asemblea Nacional-Popular Galega, part of the Partido Socialista Galego, and independents, among them Beiras, then dean of the economics faculty. Méndez Ferrín's Galicia Ceibe and the collective Arco da Vella left the assembly, and Camilo Nogueira's Esquerda Galega stayed out. Of 790 votes on the name, 529 went to Bloque Nacionalista Galego, 142 to Frente de Unidade Nacionalista and 103 to Galicia Unida. Beiras treated the label as secondary, saying the wish for unity meant accepting what had to be accepted, "even names."

At the election of 24 November 1985 to the Parliament of Galicia, then a chamber of 71, the BNG won 53,072 votes, about 4.2 percent of the valid vote, and one seat: Beiras, for A Coruña. On 17 December 1989, with 75 seats, it took 105,703 votes, about 8.0 percent, and five deputies. The People's Party (Partido Popular), including its coalition with Centristas de Galicia in Ourense, won 38 seats, an absolute majority, with Manuel Fraga heading the list in A Coruña. By 7 February 1990 Fraga was signing decrees as president of the Xunta de Galicia. Beiras led the nationalist lists for the next three regional elections.

Electoral growth and the Fraga years

The PP used those majorities to change the rules of competition. Law 15/1992, of 30 December, amending the 1985 electoral law, excluded from the allocation of seats any candidacy below 5 percent of the valid votes in a constituency. The previous threshold had been 3 percent, and the same majority also moved to cut speaking time in the chamber.

On 10 March 1993 Beiras took off a shoe and struck his desk while the socialist Ceferino Díaz condemned the reform. Days earlier Fraga had likened his protests to the 1960 gesture of Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations, and Beiras had replied that a blow with a shoe could be eloquent. In June the president of the parliament, Victorino Núñez, suspended his rights as a deputy for a month after he refused to leave a committee on the standing orders; the opposition called the sanction partisan and asked Núñez to resign.

The new threshold did not halt the bloc. On 17 October 1993 it won 269,233 votes, about 18.4 percent of the valid vote, and 13 seats; the PP took 43. On 19 October 1997 the BNG became the second force, with 395,435 votes, about 24.8 percent, and 18 seats, ahead of a coalition of the Partido dos Socialistas de Galicia–PSOE, Esquerda Unida–Esquerda Galega and Os Verdes, which received 310,508 votes and 15 seats. The PP held 42. Nogueira, outside the bloc at its foundation, was elected that year on its list for A Coruña.

On 16 July 1998 in Barcelona, the BNG, the Basque Nationalist Party and Convergència i Unió declared that twenty years of democracy had still not produced a plurinational articulation of the Spanish state, and they agreed a standing joint agenda on language and culture, taxation, symbols and institutions, and a presence in the European Union.

The election of 21 October 2001 was the first setback. After a correction of the Lugo figures, the BNG had 346,430 votes, about 22.6 percent, and 17 seats, tied with the socialists on seats but ahead of their 334,819 votes; the PP won 41 seats with 791,885 votes. For twelve years they had not met: Beiras called Fraga "the plague," and Fraga suggested a psychiatrist and accused him of encouraging violence. On election night Beiras still called him a cheat. A thaw followed, including what El País later called an iconic handshake in 2001. On 9 January 2002 they lunched for two hours in a private room in Santiago, and Beiras announced a "stable framework" of dialogue and a "peaceful relationship."

The interval ended with the Prestige oil spill. Beiras announced a BNG motion of censure, separate from the socialists', against a Xunta he called irresponsible. Both were debated on 12 December before a chamber of 41 PP deputies, 17 from the BNG and 17 from the PSdeG-PSOE, so neither could pass. Fraga said he would not abandon the ship and that the greater disaster would be to leave Galicia to demagogues.

Marginalization inside the BNG

The XI National Assembly on 23 November 2003 replaced Beiras as candidate for the presidency of the Xunta and as national spokesperson, the highest organic office, after eighteen years at the head of the lists. Anxo Quintana, 44, a senator and former mayor of Allariz outside the organized currents, won more than 70 percent of about 2,300 members, and 75 percent to Nogueira's 22.3 percent for the candidacy. Beiras, despite tense relations with the UPG, backed him and became president, with functions of "arbitration and representation." A list led by Roberto Mera still passed 28 percent and took 14 of 50 seats on the Consello Nacional. Later accounts diverge. RTVE's 2026 obituary still called him national spokesperson from the 1982 foundation until 2005. Sonia Vizoso wrote in El País that he left the 2003 contest wounded and turned to the alter-globalization movement, while La Vanguardia said the UPG had pushed him aside by the end of the 2001–2005 legislature.

On 11 April 2005 he resigned as president of the Consello Nacional, the highest body between assemblies, and refused any place on the electoral lists. The executive had turned down his proposal to head the list in A Coruña or Pontevedra, and about 85 percent of the Consello had backed the official candidacies. His letter cited a collision over the reading of the internal rules, a "repeated lack of respect" for the office and its "public disqualification," and it released Quintana from a verbal promise of second place in Pontevedra. He stayed on the Consello as an ordinary member.

When a coalition of the PSdeG and the BNG under the socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño and Quintana ended the Fraga era in 2005, Beiras criticized that government. In December 2006 he told Radio Galega that Quintana had not carried out the agreements of the 2003 assembly, either in the Xunta or in the negotiation of a new statute of autonomy. He said Quintana was "afraid of shadows," blamed the "negative influence" of the UPG secretary-general Francisco Rodríguez, and refused to accept the word "nation" in a statute unless the text made Galicia the holder of that right, calling the formula "nazón de Breogán" a joke.

On 21 July 2007 his current, Encontro Irmandiño, already holding 15 seats on the Consello Nacional, constituted itself inside the BNG. Beiras told the Santiago assembly that the aim was to stop nationalism falling into autonomism short of "the national and social emancipation of Galicia," and to "regenerate" internal life around assembly democracy. A coordinator of Beiras and ten others, including Martiño Noriega, was elected. He remained in the bloc until he left it in January 2012.

Anova and the broad-left alliances

The 2012 split and Alternativa Galega de Esquerda

The breach that took Xosé Manuel Beiras out of the Galician Nationalist Bloc opened at its XIII National Assembly, on 28 and 29 January 2012 in the Amio fairgrounds at Santiago de Compostela, later remembered as the Asemblea de Amio. The Unión do Povo Galego’s list, Alternativa pola Unidade, with national spokesperson Guillerme Vázquez as its candidate, narrowly defeated a joint slate of Beiras’s Encontro Irmandiño and Máis Galiza, the current associated with Carlos Aymerich. RTVE dates his exit to that assembly. On 11 February, before about 800 people, Encontro Irmandiño — a few hundred members, with Martiño Noriega, then mayor of Teo, beside Beiras — voted by acclamation to leave. The resolution called regeneration inside the BNG implausible and proposed a broad nationalist front weighted to the left. Beiras told them to sail into open sea and ruled himself out as “leader of anything.” Aymerich, who had just resigned as the bloc’s parliamentary spokesperson, said its model was being superseded. In March 2013 Xavier Vence replaced Vázquez as the BNG’s national spokesperson. The set piece of the legislature that followed came on 24 April 2013, when Beiras crossed the chamber and struck Feijóo’s bench.

On 14 July 2012 more than 800 voters constituted Anova–Irmandade Nacionalista, an “inclusive left” for self-determination “toward independence,” “democratic radicalism,” feminism, ecological sustainability and anti-imperialism. Beiras and Noriega sat on a 75-member coordination, and Beiras took no general secretariat. Compromiso por Galicia was the other large project to come out of the split.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, president of the Xunta de Galicia for the People’s Party of Galicia, called a snap election for 21 October 2012. Compromiso por Galicia stayed out. On 7 September Anova and Esquerda Unida, the Galician federation of the United Left, registered Alternativa Galega, the coalition that campaigned as Alternativa Galega de Esquerda (AGE). Beiras headed the A Coruña list and Yolanda Díaz, EU’s national coordinator, stood second; there was no single candidate for the Xunta. Negotiators likened it to Syriza and to the 15-M protests. Anxo Lugilde wrote in La Vanguardia that a then little-known Pablo Iglesias Turrión advised the coalition. In 2014 Iglesias said that without Beiras “Podemos would not be possible.”

On election night AGE took nine seats and 13.99 percent, third in the 75-seat Parliament of Galicia. The PP won 41 seats, on 45.72 percent; the PSdeG fell to 18; the BNG, led by Francisco Jorquera, dropped from 12 seats to seven, on about 10 percent. Jorquera called it a “great electoral setback” and blamed fragmentation; Beiras, out of the chamber since 2005, called it a political defeat of the PP anyway.

On 24 April 2013, questioned about photographs of him in the mid-1990s on a yacht with Marcial Dorado, a smuggler later convicted of drug trafficking, Feijóo told Jorquera that the opposition had only “overacting” left — to “take out the shoe,” recalling Beiras’s 1993 protest against Manuel Fraga, or to weep, as Beiras had done speaking of drug-trade victims. Beiras crossed the floor, struck Feijóo’s bench with a closed fist and demanded “a bit of decency,” saying he was unfit to preside over the Galicians. Speaker Pilar Rojo called him to order. He left shouting, and Feijóo called the gesture intimidation; Díaz, AGE’s deputy spokesperson, accused the president of a degrading spectacle, and the PP demanded an apology.

En Marea and withdrawal from parliament

For the general election of 20 December 2015, Podemos, Anova and Esquerda Unida registered En Marea; a draft naming Iglesias as their candidate for prime minister was not in the filed agreement. It also drew on the municipal “mareas” that had won city halls that May, and its deputies included Díaz, Antón Gómez-Reino and Anova’s Alexandra Fernández.

Beiras did not stand for the Galician parliament again. On 7 August 2016 he endorsed Luís Villares, a judge on leave who had won En Marea’s primaries, and wrote that he regarded his parliamentary journey as finished: “I have served my time.” On 25 September En Marea — the mareas, Podemos, Anova and Izquierda Unida, without Beiras on the lists — won 14 seats and, by about 17,000 votes, passed the PSdeG, also on 14, so Villares led the opposition. Feijóo’s PP kept 41 seats, on 47.5 percent; Ana Pontón’s BNG held six.

The confluence then broke. In June 2019 Villares and three deputies moved to the mixed group in a fight over En Marea’s designated senator, saying the group now answered to Podemos “and those who decide to follow its orders,” naming Anova and Esquerda Unida, and accusing Iglesias of trying to destroy the alliance. Sonia Vizoso wrote that this heir of the formula Beiras had built with Díaz “ended up imploding,” and that his calls for peace went unheard. Lugilde reported that Beiras felt betrayed by Díaz; that is Lugilde’s account of Beiras’s feeling, not a finding that she had broken a stated pact. On 12 July 2020 Anova stood inside Galicia en Común–Anova Mareas, with Gómez-Reino as candidate, a list Beiras appeared to back — not Pontón’s. It won no seats: the PP took 42, the BNG 19 and the PSdeG 14, the whole chamber. The BNG, on 23.8 percent, became the second party, past the 18 seats it had won under Beiras in 1997.

Rapprochement with the BNG

The later approach was not a joint list. On 14 January 2024 the BNG and Anova, coordinated by Noriega, agreed in Santiago to “concentrate the vote” on Pontón on 18 February and to collaborate toward making her “the first woman president of our country.” There was no share of posts; Anova members were not added to closed BNG lists. Beiras attended and was embraced by Pontón; Noriega spoke of closing wounds twelve years after Amio. Sumar’s Marta Lois said the pact was not her project, and Anova had already refused to join Sumar.

The BNG won 25 seats and 31.6 percent, six more than in 2020, while the PP, led in Galicia by Alfonso Rueda, kept 40. The PSdeG fell to nine. Lugilde wrote that Pontón, having already passed the bloc’s Beiras-era ceiling in 2020, did so again “along the path he had opened.” RTVE called Beiras’s part in the decision, and his presence at Pontón’s events, a reconciliation staged twelve years after Amio.

Political ideas, rhetoric and controversies

Nationalism, socialism and dependency

Beiras's central economic argument, in O atraso económico de Galicia — given to the printer in 1972 and issued by Editorial Galaxia in 1973 — treated Galicia's backwardness as a structural position, not a defect of terrain, smallholding or character. He described a dual society in which the modern urban sector put "the most corrosive forms of pressure" on a precapitalist peasantry — internal colonialism — and a "primordial dependence" of the Galician economy on the Spanish one, with emigration cast as a renunciation of revolt and the local bourgeoisie as a prop of central power. The argument drew on writers of colonialism and dependency, among them Robert Lafont, Celso Furtado, Theotonio dos Santos, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi.

He called his politics Marxist without claiming orthodoxy. In 2008 he told El País that he had always described himself as "a Marxist with a social-democratic practice": electoral realism had required him to speak less radically, "but the Marxism was there." Daniel Salgado later characterized that Marxism as syncretic and undogmatic. In an opinion article after Beiras's death, Xosé Hermida called him a "democratic Marxist" and, citing Salgado, a "radical socialist," and wrote that Paris and the London School of Economics had joined that commitment to a devotion to Albert Camus, whom Beiras translated into Galician. In that interview he said the financial crisis vindicated Karl Marx and analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein, and that Galicia was a class society, so nationalism without a left–right axis hid a drift to the centre.

Parliamentary confrontations

Hermida, in that opinion piece, contrasted long private silences with eruptions in the chamber. Anxo Lugilde wrote that he would not begin a speech in the Parliament of Galicia until the hemicycle was silent, a habit traced to French theatre. Salgado described the oratory opposite Manuel Fraga as moving between Camus's The Plague, a figure for the former Franco minister's politics, and a stock of popular abuse: long, theatrical and, for some listeners, histrionic.

Lugilde called him a "poet of the insult" who played on surnames: in old age, "Fragagá" for Fraga, "Geranio Fernández en Flor" for Gerardo Fernández Albor, "Ana Pastor Alemán" for Ana Pastor Julián, and "von Rueda" for Alfonso Rueda, president of the Xunta de Galicia — the last, Lugilde wrote, a metaphor linking him to the Third Reich. Hermida wrote that the duels with Fraga contained "many insults and many slights" as well as erudition, and that the two stopped calling each other "fascist" and "mad" only after dining together in 2001.

On 10 March 1993, as the People's Party imposed a rules change letting the government intervene at any moment, without a time limit or a right of reply — the Socialist spokesman Ceferino Díaz called it a "parliamentary coup d'état" — Beiras took off a shoe, struck his bench with it, and left with the other deputies of the Galician Nationalist Bloc. La Voz de Galicia later noted that the record marked only "interruptions," and that Fraga had compared the protests to the disputed shoe-banging of Nikita Khrushchev; before leaving, Beiras said they would not dig their own grave before being shot.

On 24 April 2013, as spokesperson of Alternativa Galega de Esquerda, he crossed the floor while Alberto Núñez Feijóo took questions about El País photographs of him, then a health official, on a yacht in the mid-1990s with the smuggler Marcial Dorado, later convicted of drug trafficking. Feijóo had taunted the opposition with the 1993 shoe and with tears Beiras had shed over a relative dead from drugs. Beiras struck Feijóo's bench with a closed fist, called him unworthy to preside over the Galicians and demanded "a little decency," then left the chamber. Feijóo called it an attempt to intimidate him; the People's Party asked for Beiras's resignation and, El País reported, described him as a "violent deputy."

He also spoke publicly about a severe psychiatric crisis in the late 1970s. In the 1989 conversations book A nación incesante he called the episodes "descents into hell" (bajadas al infierno); Lugilde wrote that Aurichu Pereira was central to his recovery, and that speaking of the illness as an ordinary pathology answered attacks calling him tolo — "mad," in Galician — and telling him to take "the little pill." Hermida wrote that he was out of public life for four years after his party's failure in the Transition.

Criticism

The thesis was disputed on the left as well as outside it. In the 1982 volume O atraso e nós, Emilio Pérez Touriño — then in the Communist Party of Spain, later socialist president of the Xunta — called the book a starting point but denied a precapitalist agrarian society and a rural–urban dualism, and held Lafont's internal colonialism inapplicable. Replying in El País in 1988, Beiras repeated that he had written Galicia had been, and remained, an "internal colony" of the Spanish state, and treated the scandal among what he called metropolitan and galeguista elites as itself a symptom.

Inside the Bloc, Salgado wrote, criticism never wholly stopped: from its right, that he polarized so sharply he could not break the ceiling of the nationalist vote; from its left, that he went his own way and neglected organization. Salgado's judgment was that there was something in the second charge: Beiras "was a tribune who brought people together, not so much an organizer." The same obituary said the People's Party dressed him as a dangerous madman and tied that image to the years of depression.

Personal life

Beiras's first wife was Teresa García-Sabell, daughter of the physician and Galicianist Domingo García-Sabell and of Elena Tormo. A 2003 obituary of her father described her as a socialist councillor in Santiago de Compostela and as Beiras's former wife. They had two sons, Daniel and Ricardo. The elder, Ricardo Beiras García-Sabell, is a full professor in the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology at the University of Vigo. El País reported that the two sons announced the public farewell, and Ana Pontón named them as Daniel and Ricardo.

For about four decades his partner was the painter Aurora Pereira Carballo, known as Aurichu Pereira (Santiago de Compostela, 15 January 1940 – 1 November 2023). She trained under Carlos Maside, joined the Estampa Galega print movement, and had an early show sponsored by Luis Seoane; she later designed clothes for her own Compostela shop and returned to exhibiting, including the series Meu Courel Imaxinario. She was the daughter of the teachers María Carballo and Xesús Pereira Vilariño, a schoolmaster jailed and then barred from state teaching after the 1936 coup. At the private Preceptoría San José, opened in Santiago in 1943, he taught the child Beiras, who remembered the school as an oasis.

Pereira had four children with the writer Salvador García-Bodaño before that relationship ended. From the 1980s she and Beiras lived at Reboraina, in Brión. Obituaries called her his partner, counsellor and companion of life; La Vanguardia described her as his second wife and as his support through a severe psychiatric crisis in the late 1970s, which he recounted in the 1989 conversations A nación incesante and called his descents into hell. After her death he told a public homage, as La Voz de Galicia reported, that he no longer even knew who he was. La Vanguardia gave a longer version of those remarks: "I have died with her in a way. I do not really know who I am. I only know that she is alive inside me."

He died in the early hours of 8 October 2026 in that stone house, A Reboraina de Aguiar, on the outskirts of Santiago. He had named it after Ramón Otero Pedrayo's novel O señorito da Reboraina, a joke at critics of his comfortable background. In his last years he seldom left. Friends said that at 90, in April 2026, he was still reading and spending more hours than ever at the piano; he used to play Alfonsina y el mar there in Pereira's memory. La Voz described him as having studied music as well as law.

The same nights, La Vanguardia wrote, he translated French classics into Galician. A 2025 study by the philologist Esperanza Mariño Davila surveyed his versions of Jean-Paul Sartre's As moscas, Albert Camus's Os xustos, and work by Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux and Edgar Morin. The Association of Writers in the Galician Language also records his 2019 translation of Camus's La Chute as A desfeita. Eduardo Galeano, whom La Vanguardia called a friend, left a portrait that begins "At first sight he looks like a lion. And he is," and credits him with "the intelligence of those rare men who lend prestige to the human condition. He had to be Galician."

Death and legacy

Death and funeral

Xosé Manuel Beiras died in the early hours of Thursday 8 October 2026, aged 90, at A Reboraina de Aguiar, a stone house on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, in Brión, A Coruña. No official medical cause was given. La Vanguardia quoted people in his closest circle — not a clinical report — as saying, “Se dejó ir. No hay una causa concreta de su muerte” (“He let himself go. There is no concrete cause of his death”).

His sons announced a public farewell the next day at the Museo do Pobo Galego. The chapel opened at noon on Friday 9 October and a homage followed at 16:00; the family asked that the house not be visited. Hundreds came, among them relatives, Martiño Noriega, politicians and people from university and cultural life. Faro de Vigo reported burial the same day at Santiago’s Boisaca cemetery. Mayor Goretti Sanmartín said she would propose a posthumous Medalla de Ouro of the city. A spokesperson for the Xunta de Galicia told elDiario.es there would be no official mourning, unlike the three days declared in 2021 for a regional finance minister.

Political reactions

Messages crossed party lines. Ana Pontón, national spokesperson of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, wrote that Beiras had left a mark on several generations, including her own, and called him a reference of courage, commitment and love of Galicia. Alfonso Rueda, the People’s Party president of the Xunta, said Beiras had marked recent decades of Galician politics, “tried to give the best of himself, without leaving anyone indifferent,” and that Galician nationalism had lost a referent. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote that Galicia had lost “a voice of its own, firm and deeply committed to its land,” and that Beiras’s defence of its language and culture already belonged to history.

Yolanda Díaz, second deputy prime minister and his 2012 running mate in Alternativa Galega de Esquerda, wrote that he stood for intellectual lucidity and commitment to emancipatory causes and that, like his beloved Albert Camus, he had made of life “an act of rebellion.” Pablo Iglesias Turrión, founder of Podemos, called him “a crucial political figure in the history of the left and of nationalism in Galicia.” José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, secretary-general of the Galician Socialists, speaking at the museum, praised a commitment to Galicia and a socialist view of social justice, and called him one of the great figures of its democratic history. Europa Press noted that Alberto Núñez Feijóo, PP leader and a former Xunta president with whom Beiras had clashed in parliament, had not yet published a message that day.

Assessments

Daniel Salgado wrote in elDiario.es that Beiras was the most important Galician nationalist intellectual and leader since Castelao: an economist whose essays helped rebuild a left-wing nationalism, the leader who took the BNG from one seat to 18 and to second place in the Parliament of Galicia in the 1990s, and later a participant in broad left fronts. El País called him a “volcanic intellectual” who led the BNG for more than two decades and then promoted an alliance of Galician sovereignty and the federal left that became a reference for parties formed after the 15-M protests. It added that the formula, which inspired Podemos and the Galician mareas, later broke down in internal fights his calls for peace did not stop, and that he again backed Pontón’s BNG near the end of his life.

Xosé Hermida, in El País, recalled the duels with Manuel Fraga — insult, erudition and theatre — and a 2021 documentary in which Beiras said he felt defeated in every cause he had fought, yet had not given up. Luis Ventoso argued in El Debate on 9 October that, in nearly fifty years in politics, Beiras “did not get to manage even a residents’ association,” and called the idea of Galicia as a colony of Madrid nationalist introspection.