Jordi Solé Tura obituary

Former communist who helped draft Spain's constitution
Jordi Sol  Tura
In the 1960s Jordi Sole Tura helped form the Bandera Roja, a student-based Maoist group. Photograph: Genin Andrada/Cover/Getty Images

Jordi Solé Tura, who has died aged 79 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was one of the seven people who, in 1977-78, drew up Spain's post-Franco democratic constitution. Elected for the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, the Catalan Communist party) to the Spanish Congress in 1977, he represented the Spanish Communist party (PCE) in drafting the constitution, which involved several months of negotiation alongside prominent fascists, such as Franco's ex-minister Manuel Fraga. The most leftwing of the seven "fathers" of the new democracy's founding document, Solé was said to be responsible for clauses guaranteeing the rights of every Spaniard to housing and a job. These clauses were not implemented.

The son of bakers in a small town outside Barcelona, Solé left school early and only started studying his bachillerato (school certificate) aged 21. In the mid-1950s, he began two decades of underground work against Franco's dictatorship, joining first the Frente de Liberación Popular (the Popular Liberation Front), then the PSUC in 1957. In 1960, he went into exile in Paris; by 1961 he had been sent to Bucharest to work as a broadcaster on Radio Pirenaica, which transmitted to Spain.

In 1964, he left the PSUC, expressing his disgust at the PCE's lack of democracy. He supported Jorge Semprún, Francesc Vicens and Fernando Claudín, who were expelled from the PCE for arguing that the exiled leadership was out of touch with events inside Spain.

Solé returned to Spain and became a lecturer in law at Barcelona University. He helped form Bandera Roja (Red Flag), a small, student-based Maoist group, and became one of its leaders (under the nom de guerre Alberto Prats). Prominent in many struggles against the dictatorship, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1969. In 1974, Solé unexpectedly led Bandera Roja into rejoining the PSUC.

In 1985, he again left the PSUC, by then in terminal collapse, and joined the Socialist party, for which he was elected to parliament in 1989, serving in three legislatures until 2000. Among other roles, he became Spain's minister of culture (1991-93), responsible for overseeing the arrival in Spain of the art collection of the steel magnate Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Solé also pursued a successful academic career, becoming chair of constitutional law at Barcelona University. One of the Spanish left's leading intellectuals, Solé published several books on political theory and translated into Catalan Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. Solé was the leading theoretical opponent of Catalan independence from the left, arguing for a federal Spain.

One could argue that someone who is a Mao-Stalinist in his 30s, a "eurocommunist" in his 40s and a minister in Felipe González's neo-liberal government in his 60s lacks political coherence. Solé himself held that he took on the mantle of "eurocommunist" from 1964 and that this "democratic communism" led him, naturally, to the Socialist party. That may be so, but it substantially rewrites his years with the PSUC and Bandera Roja. However, the eulogies from all parliamentary parties after his death reflected establishment satisfaction at Solé's view that communist militancy against Franco led naturally to support for today's capitalist monarchy.

He is survived by his second wife, Teresa Eulàlia Calzada, and his son, Albert, from his first marriage, to Anny Bruset. Albert was the director of a 2008 prize-winning documentary, Bucarest, la Memòria Perduda (Bucharest, Lost Memory) about his father and Alzheimer's disease.

Jordi Solé Tura, politician, born 23 May 1930; died 4 December 2009