We were few… In case something was missing in the political scene, pending agreements with all the gangs to form town halls and regional governments and with an eye on the general elections of 23J, the leap into the arena of the politics of a bullfighter- hung up the Traje de luces in 2011, but a bullfighter is always a bullfighter- has revolutionized the show even more.
Let’s go ahead that Vicente Barrera Simó, which is about him, is not new in this square, that of politics, since he has been flirting with it for years, from the PP to UPyD and since 2018 in VOX. And for Abascal’s party he appeared on the list of the Valencia City Council, although the number seven in the candidacy did not allow him to be elected councilor. However, he did to be Minister, as a result of the pact signed between VOX and the PP, winner of the regional elections. Minister of Culture, to be exact. And Troy burned.
Vicente Barrera Simó, in addition to being a bullfighter, is a lawyer, a career he pursued following his father’s designs to distance him from the call of blood, the imprint of his grandfather Vicente Barrera y Cambra, a right-handed man with a marked personality, who was a figure of bullfighting for decades. of the thirties and forties of the previous century and whose last bullfight, in 1945, had La Monumental de Barcelona as its stage.
The grandson never saw his grandfather fight, he never even got to know him (he died in 1956), he grew up detached from the world of bullfighting but when, when he turned eighteen, he saw the first bullfighting festivities, something shook him inside. He waited to finish his degree, he fought some festivals and heifers and, already at twenty-three years old, he made his debut with picadors. The alternative came on Saint Jaume’s Day in 1994 in the Plaza de Valencia and his godfather was none other than Curro Romero. His was not a long career dotted with many serious gorings, indebted to a bullfighting of stillness and verticality and passing the pitons with adjustment and serene courage.
Vicente Barrera’s is not the only case in history in which politics and bullfighting have gone closely hand in hand.
This is the case of Luis Mazzantini, born in Elgoibar in 1856, who after family journeys through different countries ended up in Madrid where he developed his bullfighting career until his retirement in 1904. Mazzantini went down in bullfighting history as a great swordsman and in politics. because in 1905, as a Liberal Party candidate in the Madrid municipal elections, he outvoted none other than Pablo Iglesias, founder of the PSOE, for his Chamberí district.
Also, the Torero Brigade, a battalion of the Republican Army in which, hence its name, several bullfighting professionals fought.
Bullfighting, historically attached to the Ministry of the Interior -before, the Interior- passed to Culture in 2011, thus achieving a long-fought recognition. A struggle in which to her own hallmarks – which have nothing to do with jingoism – are added what made her the watchword of her life and work, many of them from ideological positions in the antipodes of the postulates from VOX, from Lorca or Alberti to Bergamín or Miguel Hernández, passing through Picasso.
Also bullfighters like Antoñete “the left kills, the right executes,” he said; Gregorio Sánchez or José Luis Parada showed their closeness to the PCE.
Vicente Barrera, bullfighter, will be Minister of Culture in the Generalitat of Valencia and hopefully both he and his family, as well as those who seek to ridicule him from the other ideological shore, keep in mind the words of Federico García Lorca (shot by fascism in Víznar together with a school teacher and two banderilleros). “Bullfighting, the most cultured festival in the world today”
