José Miguel Pérez, former vice president of the Canary Islands and leader of the PSOE for six years, dies

The former Canarian socialist leader José Miguel Pérez has died this Monday at the age of 67 after a long battle against cancer, as sources from his environment and the PSOE of Gran Canaria have confirmed to EFE.

Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, José Miguel Pérez presided over the Cabildo de Gran Canaria between 2007 and 2011 and then held the responsibility of vice president and Minister of Education of the Government of the Canary Islands (2011-2015), in an executive coalition with Paulino Rivero (CC).

José Miguel Pérez had been fighting cancer for years with ups and downs in his health due to the disease and the effects of the treatments, but this outcome has surprised even his friends, who did not expect it, one of them confessed to EFE.

The current minister Ángel Víctor Torres succeeded him as general secretary at the head of the PSOE of the Canary Islands, who received the news of his death in Valencia, where he is attending a meeting of the center that coordinates the response to the ravages of the floods.

"The blow of the death of José Miguel Pérez reaches me. A fighting man. He never gave up. A great president of the Cabildo and also vice president of the Government of the Canary Islands. He took the reins of the PSOE of the Canary Islands in difficult times," Torres writes on his X social network account.

Torres has also released a condolence video in which he remembers Pérez as "a magnificent politician, an intellectual, a fair and generous man," who helped the PSOE a lot with "his intellectual capacity and his progressive vision of helping those most in need."

"He always put an agreement before a dispute, a consensus before a disparity, an argument before an insult. We will miss him," concludes the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory.

José Miguel Pérez took the reins of the Canarian PSOE in 2010, replacing Juan Fernando López Aguilar and led the party for six years, until he presented his resignation in November 2016, to focus on personal matters and, above all, on his work as a university professor.

From his political background, his former collaborators remember his conciliatory spirit, which helped, for example, the Government of the Canary Islands that he formed together with Rivero to be the first autonomous executive coalition to finish a legislature without ruptures.

During his time as president of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, he launched the negotiations that allowed the personal archive of the last president of the Government of the II Republic, Juan Negrín, which until then was in Paris, to return to the island.

In the Government of the Canary Islands, he reacted to the expansion of child poverty rates caused by the 2008 recession on the islands with a measure that other communities later reproduced: during his term as Minister of Education, the school canteens of the archipelago remained open also during the summer holidays to offer breakfasts to families with fewer resources.

The summer program of the canteens also included English courses and recreational workshops, with a double purpose: to give more content to their activity and to prevent the minors who had to resort to them due to lack of resources from being stigmatized.