His last major appointment was in his native region: in 1990, Fraga, previously a fierce centralist and opponent of Galician national rights, was elected president of the autonomous community of Galicia, a post he held until ill health and the Prestige oil disaster forced him out in 2005.
Only a loss of credibility following the mishandling of the Prestige oil tanker disaster sank Fraga, and in 2005, he lost his overall majority in the Galician parliament.
Mr Aznar's mishandling of the Prestige oil-tanker disaster, his hugely unpopular pro-American stand in the war against Iraq and his authoritarian style of leadership had helped to give the opposition Socialists an opinion-poll lead of some six percentage points.
Both strategies have abundant prestige, but both are disasters, since they strip objects of their autonomy and enslave them to a less worthy principle.
Among them, fuel oil samples coming from the recent disaster of the Prestige tanker off the Galician shoreline showed a distinctive behaviour.
No serious study of French imperialism argues that the actual mainsprings of colonial policy were other than those of Great Britain, except that the French had the additional motive of badly needing prestige to compensate for the disaster of 1870-71.
Its prestige was damaged by the 2015 disaster, in which Riyadh said 769 pilgrims were killed, the highest hajj death toll since a crush in 1990.
As the breakup of the oil tanker Prestige turned into a slow-motion disaster, Spaniards' early focus on cleaning up the mess gave way Thursday to second-guesses and recriminations.
She also filed reports from Iraq on the war, and from Galicia in northern Spain following the ecological disaster when the oil tanker Prestige sank.
Spain's north-west coast suffered one of the worst environmental disasters for years on Tuesday when the Prestige oil tanker finally broke up 150 miles offshore, taking more than 70,000 tonnes of fuel into the Atlantic with it.
