Last week, in a radio interview with Carlos Alsina, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo suggested his willingness, in the event of being president of the government, to concentrate the ministries of Education, Culture and Universities in a single one in order to “contain public spending”.
The following day, in the little suspicious of hostility ABC newspaper, an analyst as solvent as Jesús García Calero described this announcement as a “strategy error that is difficult to overcome”, recalling that Spain as a cultural power, moves 700,000 jobs, and that if it suppresses the Ministry of Culture will not be able to count, among other things, with front-row representation in the European Council of the field.
The Galician politician’s statement brings echoes of old situations. What happens to the Popular Party with the management of culture? Is it true, as has been said, that the sector is more in tune with the political left?
The Spanish Ministry of Culture launched it UCD in 1977, with Pío Cabanillas as the first owner. He played a very active role in the democratic reestablishment, as Giulia Quaggio recalls in her essential study Culture in Transition.
The PSOE, when the time came to govern, intensified its power in tune with the winds that came from France, where Mitterrand had accelerated the “Cultural State” inspired in his day by De Gaulle by an already conservative André Malraux.
Between 1979 and 1982, the Spanish socialists increased cultural spending in the cities where they governed by 500%. When they came to power in the state, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra surrounded themselves with intellectuals and recruited cultural ministers with a pedigree: the most, Jorge Semprún, but also Javier Solana and Carmen Alborch.
In later socialist stages (those of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero) the tendency to sign important figures continued, indisputable insiders such as the writer César Antonio Molina or the filmmaker Ángeles González-Sinde.
With the PP the opposite has happened a bit. Every time Spain governs, the Ministry of Culture becomes blurred under the umbrella of Education. José María Aznar ordered it in 1996 and it remained that way until 2004.
In that period, the conservative administration had some intellectually respected figure, such as the poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca in the Secretary of State, but the heads of the joint ministry, such as Esperanza Aguirre or the future president Mariano Rajoy, were generally seen as outsiders of the field of creation and thought.
The autonomy restored to Culture by Rodriguez Zapatero was lost again with the inauguration of Rajoy in 2011. The ownership of the renewed joint ministry fell to the belligerent figure of José Ignacio Wert. Those were years in which the economic leaders of the PP government made decisions that had a very negative effect on the sector: cultural VAT was raised to 21% and the copyright ceiling that retired writers could receive was cut to a minimum, without the secretary of State José Maria Lassalle could prevent it. Some measures that generated numerous protests, which were difficult to reverse and still hurt.
The cyclical appearance and disappearance of the Ministry of Culture well emblematizes the relationship of the conservatives with the sector. Of course, neither the entire stage of the PP was bad in this field, nor was the entire stage of the Socialists irreproachable. In both cases there were ups and downs. Rodríguez Uribes, Iceta’s predecessor, declared, for example, at the beginning of the pandemic that culture was not a priority, a strange statement for an area manager. But with the exceptions that are wanted, the intellectual and creative sector tends to consider that the PSOE is interested in culture (and more or less takes care of it).
While the PP seems to undervalue it. And, as seen recently in Castilla y León, and this week in the Valencian Community and in the Burgos city council, the party can easily hand it over to Vox, forgetting that the management of culture is that of the discourse on society, the of symbolism and the diffusion of ideas. And therefore hotbed of future votes. It is as if the Spanish moderate conservatives gave up institutionally working on this discourse.
Then, of course, daily work is what it is. Within the PSOE, the podemite discourse has opened up a lot of space, especially in contemporary art centers. While Paco de la Torre, mayor of the PP in Malaga, has revealed himself in recent decades as the great manager who has relaunched Malaga in a museum key, showing how a solid cultural policy can be developed from a conservative position that seeks the consensus.
But Nuñez Feijóo has not said anything about appointing Paco de la Torre as minister. On the other hand, the recent pacts of his party suggest where the cultural management of the state could go in the event of a popular victory in need of support on July 23.
