Esperanza Aguirre

Esperanza Aguirre y Gil de Biedma, Countess of Murillo and Bornos, Grandee of Spain, DBE (Spanish pronunciation: [espeˈɾanθa aˈɣire]; born 3 January 1952) is a Spanish politician and former President of Madrid. She was President of Madrid's People's Party and the first female politician to have held the office of President of the Senate and Minister of Education and Culture in Spanish democratic history.

Aguirre is a former member of Unión Liberal, Partido Liberal and Popular Alliance, which changed its name to Partido Popular (People's Party) in 1989. Since her early years she has been a member of the Club Liberal of Madrid, which was presided over by an economics professor at the Complutense University, Pedro Schwartz. Schwartz reportedly played an important role in the beginnings of Aguirre's political career: in 1983, he was the one to convince her, by then a civil servant, to stand in the Madrid local elections of that year for Schwartz's Liberal Union and become a councilwoman.