THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Towards a new legislative term

BIOGRAPHIES 115 Diego López Garrido. Chair of the European Affairs Council of Fundación Alternativas. He is an economist, Professor of Constitutional Law and lawyer of the Span- ish Parliament. He was Secretary of State for the EU from April 2008 to December 2011, and coordinated the Spanish presidency of the EU in 2010. He was spokesman for the Socialist Group in Congress (2006- 2008) and a member of Parliament for six legislatures. He was a member of the convention that drafted the European Constitutional Treaty, the predecessor of the current Treaty of Lisbon, representing the Spanish Par- liament (2002-2003). He has been vice-president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. He is the author of numerous books on human rights, economics, politics, contemporary history and European law. He is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País. His latest publica- tions are La Edad de Hielo. Europe and the United States in the Face of the Great Crisis: the Rescue of the Welfare State (RBA, 2014), The Ice Age. Bailing Out the Welfare State in the Era of Austerity (London Publishing Part- nership, 2015) and Paraísos fiscales. Veinte propuestas para acabar con la gran evasión (La Catarata, 2016); he has also directed together with D. Lucio Pegoraro and D. Marcos Massó Derecho constitucional comparado (Ti- rant Lo Blanc, 2017), as well as Lecciones de Derecho Constitucional de España y de la Unión Europea (Ti- rant Lo Blanch, 2018). Luise Rürup. She has been working at the Friedrich- Ebert-Stiftung (FES) since the early 1990s. In September 2020 she was appointed FES representative in Spain. Prior to her position at FES Madrid, Luise headed the FES liaison office with the United Nations, the Interna- tional Monetary Fund and the World Bank, located in New York (USA). Previously she held various positions at FES, including head of department at the headquar- ters in Berlin (Germany), country representative and executive director in Santiago de Chile (Chile), New Delhi (India), Erfurt/Thüringen (Germany) and Istanbul (Turkey). After studying Political Science, Regional Stud- ies, Philosophy and Geography at the Free University of Berlin, the Universitá di Urbino (Italy) and the University of Hamburg, she graduated in Political Science with a diploma from the University of Hamburg. She comple- mented her education with a one-year vocational post- graduate program at the Center for Advanced Training in Rural Development/International Cooperation in Sus- tainable Development (SLE/Humboldt University) in Ber- lin. Prior to her engagement with FES, she was involved in multidisciplinary research and consulting in rural ar- eas of Costa Rica and Tanzania. Luise is a long-standing member of the German trade union Ver.di and the social democratic SPD party.