Xosé Manuel Beiras

Xosé Manuel Hixinio Beiras Torrado was born in Santiago de Compostela on 7 April 1936, a few months before the coup of July 1936 that started the Spanish Civil War. He liked to say he had been born with the Popular Front. His family were merchants in Santiago and active in the Partido Galeguista founded by Castelao. His father, Manuel Beiras, was among the party's founders and in 1935 joined its small right-wing split, Dereita Galeguista, but after the war he stayed loyal to the republican ideal rather than follow other members into Francoism. He received the Medalla Castelao in 1987. His uncle was Antón Beiras García.

Refusing to send his children to the dictatorship's schools, Manuel Beiras placed their education in the hands of Jesús Pereira, an old republican schoolmaster who had been purged. Beiras grew up inside the cultural resistance of postwar Galician nationalism, in which the intellectual Ramón Piñeiro was the dominant mentor.

Beiras graduated in law from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1957 and the same year enrolled at the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences of the Sorbonne in Paris, where he also studied French language and literature. In 1960 he taught his first course in political economy at the Complutense University of Madrid, and from 1961 he continued his economics studies at the London School of Economics.

In the 1966 to 1967 academic year a Juan March Foundation scholarship took him back to Paris for advanced research with François Perroux at the Institut de science économique appliquée. There he encountered Robert Lafont's theory of internal colonialism, which stayed in his political vocabulary for decades. His doctoral thesis, published in 1970 as Estructura y problemas de la población gallega, won an Extraordinary Doctoral Prize.

Beiras was vice-director of the Revista de Economía de Galicia from 1963 to 1968. In 1967 his book O problema do desenrolo na Galiza rural won a prize from Casa Galicia in New York. He returned to Galicia permanently in 1968 to teach economic structure and institutions at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he became associate professor after his doctorate and full professor (catedrático) of structural economics in 1980.

In 1972 he published O atraso económico de Galiza, his most influential work, and agreed to act as dean of the Faculty of Economics during the student and worker protests of those years. He was elected dean in February 1982 and re-elected in 1984. He directed research on the modernisation of Galician agriculture funded by the Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza and the University of Montpellier, and was a visiting professor at Coimbra (1976) and Toulouse. His students included Emilio Pérez Touriño and Abel Caballero. He took leave from teaching in 1999.

In 1963 Beiras was a founding member of the clandestine Partido Socialista Galego (PSG), the first nationalist party of the postwar period. He handled its international relations, building links with European socialist parties and with Josep Pallach and Joan Raventós in Catalonia, and became secretary general in 1971. Under his leadership the party moved left and worked with the communist Unión do Povo Galego. After the PSG won about 2.4 percent and no seats in the 1977 general election, he left the leadership and the party.

In 1982 he took part in the founding of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) at the Riazor fronton in A Coruña, and on 24 November 1985 he was elected to the Parliament of Galicia for A Coruña as the Bloc's only deputy. He led the BNG to 5 seats in 1989, 13 in 1993 and 18 in October 1997, when it overtook the Socialists to become the second force in Galicia. He was the Bloc's national spokesperson from 1982 to 2002 and its candidate for president of the Xunta in several elections. In 2004 he helped sign the Galeusca agreement with Catalan and Basque nationalist parties. On 11 April 2005 he resigned as president of the BNG National Council and stood down as a candidate, leaving parliament that June.

In 2007 he founded the internal current Encontro Irmandiño, and after the Amio assembly of 2012 he left the BNG to found Anova-Irmandade Nacionalista. As head of the Alternativa Galega de Esquerda (AGE) list, an alliance with Esquerda Unida and others including Yolanda Díaz, he returned to parliament in 2012 with 9 deputies. He later backed the En Marea coalition with Podemos. On 7 August 2016 he announced his retirement from parliamentary life, and in March 2017 he was succeeded as Anova's national spokesperson. In January 2024 he publicly reconciled with the BNG and its leader Ana Pontón, and campaigned for her in the February 2024 Galician election.

Beiras married the philologist Teresa García-Sabell, with whom he had two sons, Daniel and Ricardo, described by Praza Pública as an architect and a biologist. After the political defeat of 1977 he went through four years of depression that he later described in vivid terms. At the end of 1981 he began living with the painter Aurichu Pereira, the daughter of his childhood teacher Jesús Pereira, who became his second wife and, in the words of Praza, the great companion of his life. She died on 1 November 2023 at the age of 83, a loss from which he never fully recovered. The Bolivian president Rodrigo Paz Pereira is his nephew by marriage.

He lived for many years in a large house at A Reboraina in Brión, near Santiago, where he would welcome visitors with a piano recital. He kept smoking English blond tobacco almost to his last days. The doctor and former Santiago mayor Martiño Noriega was his closest political ally and friend, and Beiras called him a brother.

Beiras described himself as antifascist and Galicianist. In Paris he moved from moderate liberalism to Marxism, and by the time he published O atraso económico de Galiza he was a Marxist, though heterodox, syncretic and anti-dogmatic, a socialist without labels. He analysed Galicia through theories of dependency, centre and periphery and internal colonialism, drawing on Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and the national liberation movements of Algeria and Cuba.

In the 2000s he read Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi closely, became friends with Eduardo Galeano and Ignacio Ramonet, and joined the alter-globalisation movement. He preferred the word altermundialism to anti-globalisation and sat on the council of the World Social Forum from 2008. Anova, the party he founded, combined ecologism, republicanism and Galician independence. In his final years he spoke out strongly in support of the Palestinian people.

elDiario.es called Beiras the most important Galician nationalist intellectual and leader since Castelao. His economic essays fed the rebuilding of Galician nationalism on the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and his leadership turned the BNG from a single deputy into the main opposition. His 1997 seat total for the Bloc stood as its record until Ana Pontón won 25 seats in 2024, and Europa Press noted in 2024 that he still held the Bloc's record for votes won as a candidate.

His AGE coalition of 2012 is widely seen as a forerunner of the broad left alliances that followed across Spain, and the young Pablo Iglesias advised on its campaign. On his death the BNG called him a fundamental figure of contemporary Galician nationalism, and Ana Pontón wrote that he had left a deep mark on several generations, including her own.

Casa Galicia of New York prize (1967) for O problema do desenrolo na Galiza rural. Extraordinary Doctoral Prize for his 1970 thesis on the Galician population. Elected to the Real Academia Galega in the 1970s, a seat he later renounced without taking up after disagreeing with the academy's language policy. Subject of the national homage volume Á beira de Beiras (Galaxia, 2011). Premio Luís Porteiro Garea of the University of Santiago de Compostela (2022) for his work for the Galician language. Homage as a writer in Santiago de Compostela (June 2025), where he planted a yew tree in Galeras park. Premio Lois Peña Novo (2026, 30th edition), awarded for six decades of work for the dignity of Galicia and its language.

Major works include O problema do desenrolo na Galiza rural (1967), Estructura y problemas de la población gallega (1970), O atraso económico de Galiza (1972), O atraso e Nós (1982), Por unha Galiza liberada (1984), Constitución española e nacionalismo galego (1985), Prosas de combate e maldicer (1991), O estado da nación (1996), A catástrofe do Prestige (2003), Exhortación á desobediencia (2013), O proxecto común da nación galega (2016), Nuredin o taxista e Amedine o pintor (2019) and Retratos en fite (2022).

He translated into Galician Jean Anouilh's Antigone (with Xosé Luís Franco Grande), Albert Camus's Les Justes, Caligula and Letters to a German Friend, Anne Philipe's Le Temps d'un soupir and Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. He helped promote collections at Editorial Galaxia, co-founded Edicións Laiovento, and wrote for Galicia Hoxe, A Nosa Terra and Grial. Book-length conversations with him by Miguel Anxo Fernán Vello and Francisco Pillado appeared as A nación incesante (2000) and A estrela na palabra (2004). He appeared on Pablo Iglesias's programme Otra Vuelta de Tuerka in 2017.

Beiras was often expelled from sessions of the Parliament of Galicia. In the 1989 to 1993 term he was expelled several times while opposing Manuel Fraga. On 10 March 1993 he banged a shoe on his desk in protest at the Popular Party's plan to raise the threshold for entering parliament from 3 to 5 percent, was expelled on 15 and 17 March and sanctioned with a month without parliamentary rights, and took the case to the Constitutional Court, which admitted his appeal. In 2013 he confronted Alberto Núñez Feijóo at his seat after the publication of photographs of Feijóo with the smuggler Marcial Dorado, demanding decency. In March 2016 he was expelled again after a clash with PP deputy Miguel Tellado and lost 15 days' pay. Opponents on the right portrayed him as dangerous and used his years of depression against him, while critics inside the BNG accused him of polarising and of acting alone.

Beiras died during the early hours of Thursday 8 October 2026 at his home in A Reboraina, Brión, in the province of A Coruña, surrounded by family and friends, aged 90. His death was confirmed to EFE and elDiario.es by people close to him. A cause of death has not been made public. Anova announced that his lying in repose would be held at the Museo do Pobo Galego in Santiago de Compostela from 12:00 on Friday 9 October, with a small civic act around 16:00, followed by burial at Boisaca cemetery. The family asked for privacy and for people not to visit the family home. Tributes came from the BNG, Anova, Ana Pontón, BNG deputy Néstor Rego and Basque nationalists including EH Bildu's Gorka Elejabarrieta.