María Margarita Robles Fernández (pronounced [maɾɣaˈɾita ˈroβles]; born 10 November 1956 in León) is a Spanish judge and politician, currently serving as Minister of Defence since June 2018.

[4] Close to the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in 1993 she was appointed Under Secretary of the Ministry of Justice under Juan Alberto Belloch.

[7] In May 2016, Robles jumped back into politics when Pedro Sánchez announced she would occupy the second spot of the socialist list for Madrid in the upcoming general election.

After Sánchez had won the congress, Robles was appointed spokesperson of the Socialist Parliamentary Group, replacing José Luis Ábalos.

[20] On 4 September 2018 the Ministry of Defence announced that it was considering cancelling a major contract with Saudi Arabia consisting in 400 laser-guided bombs because of the possible use of these weapons in the Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni civil war.

[32] For this task, under her direction, Robles appointed the JEMAD, Miguel Ángel Villarroya Vilalta, as sole command of all the measures that his department carried out.

[33] During the health crisis, her department mainly deployed the Military Emergencies Unit (UME), which was responsible for the disinfection of thousands of retirement homes[34] as well as other public places such as train stations, ports and airports.

[35][36] At the same time, different military, naval and air police units were also deployed to collaborate with the law enforcement agencies in public security tasks.

[37] At the end of March, Robles publicly denounced abandoned, and sometimes dead, elderly people in some of the retirement homes that the UME had disinfected.

[38] The head of the Military Emergencies Unit, Luis Manuel Martínez Meijide, stated shortly after that these cases were "very punctual".

Margarita Robles praised the task of the Armed Forces, to which she attributed all the successes, and assumed "exclusively" all the errors that would have been committed as her own.

[41] Following the fall of Kabul and the subsequent de facto creation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Prime Minister offered Spain as a hub for Afghans who collaborated with the European Union, which would later be settled in various countries.

[42] The Spanish government created a temporary refugee camp in the air base of Torrejón de Ardoz, which was later visited by the highest officials from the European Union.