Converts are the worst. They try to hide it, but they always run the risk of someone reminding them of their past. To resolve this embarrassing situation, it is usual to endure the push and give it a lot of face. That’s what Juan Carlos Girauta does, who is already in his fourth match, but he says he hasn’t moved from where he was. It was the others who moved while he remained intrepid in the same place. The PSC moved, the PP moved, Ciudadanos moved, the Earth moved, the Sun moved, and Girauta suddenly discovered that he had remained in Vox territory. The universe is spinning left at high speed, leaving you with no choice but to enroll in a new training course. They’ll end up driving him crazy, but in the meantime he already has another elected official’s salary.
Juan Luis Cebrián is another of those who have shown great ability in lateral movement. Of course he says that those who moved and in the wrong direction were Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE. Generally speaking, reality has collapsed in the face of their discontent. He claims that we are governed by “idiots”, and not only in Spain. Almost everywhere in the world. He comments that when he was at university, De Gaulle governed (in France). We are in the last ones.
At the presentation of his latest book – “The Sánchez Effect” – which is a compilation of articles, he was present on Monday in the presence of Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. The Popular Party MP has the sharpest language on the Spanish right and the most precise objective. After all, it shows that he has read a lot. The truth is that the same cannot be said of Feijóo and Tellado. Cebrián had the opportunity to taste their bites and they were nice.
Never shy when it comes to impressing his audience, Álvarez de Toledo started by recognizing the obvious. “If Polanco saw me here, I wonder what he would say. “I would say Cebrián has gone crazy.” An interesting hypothesis that many journalists who worked for him are likely to share.
From there, he recalled that his beginnings in politics were precisely to attack the Prisa company of which Cebrián was then the main director under the orders of Jesús de Polanco. “My first political action was to promote the boycott of Grupo Prisa,” he said, referring to his party’s response to a speech by Polanco who described a PP demonstration as “pure Francoism.”
This media boycott of Prisa did not end on a specific date, the representative said, but rather ended up diluted over time, and it was unclear whether she regretted it or thought it was the appropriate ending.
“I am not at all sure that the Juan Luis of today is the same as the Juan Luis of before,” he explained later, thus closing what one could call the exit of Girauta. But that’s not your problem. “Cebrián concentrated and the PSOE went to the extreme.” So I’m a bit of a convert, yes.
The former director of El País and former president of Prisa felt obliged to deny it: “Cayetana is happy, because I have changed a lot, but I have changed almost nothing.” So, like Girauta, the fault would be that of El País and the PSOE. Or the country, with a lowercase letter.
When it came to punishing the party he supported so much from the newspaper he directed, he did not fail, which pleased his interlocutor. “The PSOE is not a party. It is a sect and it threatens to become a mafia,” he announced, thus joining the radical views of the most combative right-wing media. He now writes in one of them, L’Objectif, whose editorial board president is Antonio Caño, that Cebrián appointed director of El País to redress the situation until the company discovered that it was leading it to ruin. “We tried to be right-wing, but it didn’t work,” the company’s new majority shareholder said years later.
In great exclusivity, he declared that the deputies and ministers of the PSOE are not workers, in reference to the name of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. Seeing someone with Cebrián’s personal and professional background accuse others of not being workers is something that attracts attention. It’s not my fault – everyone is born where they were born and devotes themselves to what they want – although neither do others.
Another of his unleashed fifths, and who was also present at the presentation, was the writer Félix de Azúa, collaborator with El País for decades and today, what a coincidence, also in The Objective. The government has become “a tyranny or a satrapy where it is not clear which regime it is aimed at,” he said. The good thing about inviting writers like him to a book presentation is that they use words like “satrapy.”
At 80, the only thing he personally regrets is not being younger, because others would find out. “If I were 50 years younger, I would tell you that the time has come for action, for citizen action. “I’m not saying we’re becoming Hamas.” It’s a relief not to have to imagine Azúa with a green headband and a Kalashnikov in her hand. The problem was that he immediately announced that “the time for words was up.” Civic action without words. That seems strange coming from a writer. This is a concept that needs to be worked on more.
In this confusion between El País and the country which has always given rise to so many misunderstandings, Álvarez de Toledo spoke of the newspaper in unfriendly terms. Although she could have been referring to the second, she seemed to speak of the newspaper with a phrase that is precisely fitting for someone who has not forgotten the boycott she spoke about and was so pleased with. “Today it’s sad and sometimes it’s even funny,” he said. Cebrián preferred not to follow this line.
It was only a coincidence that the event coincided with the first article of a new contributor to the opinion section of El País. This is another signature made in right field. So that his friends don’t tell him that he sold out to Prisa, the author started his journey by giving a good kick to one of the great icons of the cultural left, Pedro Almodóvar. These things did not happen when Cebrián ran the newspaper or chaired the company. One day a literary critic published a very negative review about a writer from Alfaguara and things did not end well. For the critic, of course.
In this line of abjuration of everything that has been done in Spain since Zapatero, because no criticism has been heard from the right, Cebrián declared that “there is a direct betrayal of the spirit of the Transition “. He does not understand that this country, like any other, can be governed according to different criteria than those of the 1980s. There are those who think that they should live in the Spain of the past or believe that the culmination of the intelligence in political history was then achieved.
At this point, many respond with a list of the errors of the Transition in relation to their ideological position. This is not the main problem. It is more relevant to think that it is not possible to repeat solutions from 40 years ago thinking that they will be as effective as then. The world is changing and a few people Cebrián’s age are sure that everything has gone to hell. Financially he did very well, but he ended up writing for The Objective. How not to be angry.
