Early Life and Education
Born 27 March 1955 in Santiago de Compostela (A Coruña), Galicia. Rajoy is the grandson of Enrique Rajoy Leloup, one of the architects of the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia in 1932, who was removed from university teaching by the dictatorship in the early 1950s. He is the son of Mariano Rajoy Sobredo, a jurist, and president of the Provincial Court of Pontevedra, the city where he grew up.
Later on, his father, was transferred to León and the whole family moved there. Rajoy attended a school that was later attended by José Luis Zapatero as well. He was duly enrolled, together with his brothers Luis and Enrique, in a Jesuit school of that city, and spent ten years there before moving to the Jesuit school in Vigo. After finishing secondary school he started university, enrolling in the Law Faculty in Santiago de Compostela.
Rajoy graduated from the University of Santiago de Compostela and passed the competitive examination required in Spain to enter into the civil service, becoming the youngest-ever property registrar at age 23.
He was assigned to Padrón (A Coruña), Villafranca del Bierzo (León) and Santa Pola (Alicante) a position he still holds. In that year, Rajoy was injured in the face following a traffic accident. Since then, he has always had a beard to hide the scars of these injuries.
On 28 December 1996 in La Toja island (Pontevedra) Mariano married Elvira "Viri" Fernández Balboa. The couple have two children.
While on the campaign trail in 2011, Rajoy published an autobiography, En confianza (In Confidence), in which he recalled his studious and quiet youth, following a father who was climbing the ranks of Francisco Franco's judiciary. He talks of a happy childhood as the son of a judge, and how he used Vim and Ajax to clean the barracks during his military service in Valencia.
He stated that he married his wife Viri "for the rest of his life" and described how he was affected by the death of his mother when she was 61, as well as the large influence his father had on his life. Rajoy told his readers that he entered politics not against his own will, but against that of his father. He admitted he has thought about abandoning politics during the hard times, but that he stayed "because of personal responsibility and to keep the party united". He says he will donate the book sales to charity and the needy.
Read more about this topic: Mariano Rajoy
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“The child to be concerned about is the one who is actively unhappy, [in school].... In the long run, a child’s emotional development has a far greater impact on his life than his school performance or the curriculum’s richness, so it is wise to do everything possible to change a situation in which a child is suffering excessively.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)