José Luis Martínez-Almeida


José Luis Martínez-Almeida Navasqüés is a Spanish state lawyer and politician. A member of the People's Party, he has been a member of the Madrid City Council since 2015 and serves as Mayor of Madrid since 2019.

Biography

Martínez-Almeida was born in Madrid on 17 April 1975. His grandfather Pablo Martínez-Almeida y Nacarino was a member of the, he is the youngest of the six children of Rafael Martínez-Almeida y León y Castillo and Ángela Navasqüés Cobián. He studied at the Retamar School in Pozuelo de Alarcón, linked to the Opus Dei. He is single and a golf lover.
Martínez-Almeida affiliated to the People's Party when he was 20 years old, and he earned a Licentiate degree in law at the ICADE in 1998. In 2001, he joined the State Lawyers Corps.
He served as Director-General for Historic Heritage of the Community of Madrid from 2007 to 2011. In 2011, Esperanza Aguirre, the region's premier, appointed him as Secretary of the Council of Government of the Community of Madrid. He left the regional government in 2013 in order to become a member of the General Secretariat and Council of state-owned enterprise SEPIDES as Secretary of the Law Division. He left this post in 2015.
Aguirre included Martínez-Almeida 3rd in the PP list for the 2015 Madrid municipal election and the later became municipal councillor. In 2017, as Aguirre resigned from her last offices following the detention of her political "dauphin" Ignacio González, Martínez-Almeida replaced her as Spokesperson of the PP's Municipal Group in the City Council. His interventions as leader of the opposition made him widely known.
In July 2018, he was appointed member of the National Executive Committee of the PP after the election of Pablo Casado as party leader.
In January 2019, he was designated candidate of the PP to be the next Mayor of Madrid.

Mayor of Madrid

He ran first in the PP list for the 2019 Madrid municipal election. Martínez-Almeida lost the council election against Manuela Carmena, Más Madrid, but due to a coalition agreement among PP Popular Party, C's Citizens and Vox, he was invested as Mayor on 15 June 2019, during the opening session of the new municipal corporation.
During the campaign, the PP pledged to get rid of one of the most characteristical measures by the previous municipal administration, the low emission zone Madrid Central. As promised, on July 1, the City Council led by Martínez-Almeida suspended the system for three months by ceasing to fine infractions. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace cut roads in protest. However, a week later a court in Madrid restored the fines.
During the COVID-19 sanitary crisis he received the support of an unified City Council. His performance gained for him a record popularity among the citizens. When the time arrived to re-start the normal activity of the country he was the first spanish political figure in achieving transversal agreements for the reconstruction.