Sweetness is an essential factor in Yolanda DÃaz’s way of communicating. A ring of a laughing, singing voice that gives the message feeling. This is an unusual characteristic in the political arena, where an objectively neutral tone prevails, little given to the expressiveness that so often involves entering demonic gardens. Far from the affectation that the term includes, in DÃaz, this closeness and sweetness is facilitated by his galeguidade, which endows the words with feeling through diminutives: these bikinis so attached to his speech.
Last summer I spent a few days in Vigo thanks to the hospitality of my friend and writer Inma López Silva. On my first solitary walk I was shocked that the baker greeted me with an effervescent “hello chula!”. I wanted to laugh at his humor despite his astonishment, but I immediately noticed as much normality as routine in the greeting. As if a bit of sugar had stuck to the palate, without clouding it. Rather, it had to do with a joyful sadness, a kind of obligation to soften the deal, just like that “Boas noites, sentidinho”, with which Xabier Fortes said goodbye to the telenovelas.
Those days, Inma and I attended, with her partner, Francisco Castro, editor of Galaxia, a tribute to Domingo Villar in Moaña, and the mayoress gave a speech as if the sun dazzled her, widening her eyes, sparkling and almost excited He speaks like Yolanda DÃaz I told my friends, adjusting the words to spin a musicality that crosses any barrier of understanding.
That laughing and approachable timbre, capable of knocking down the fourth wall – politics has a lot of theater -, also has detractors. The same people who gave her the ingenious nickname of “La Fashionaria” accuse her of being “cheesy” and “stupid”. They can’t stand that DÃaz embodies a less imposed institutionality, even if dressed in good crepe. Or wasn’t it his compatriot, Adolfo DomÃnguez, who returned his dignity to the wrinkle?
A little more than a century ago, in Madrid it was said that “Galicia only gives watermen or ministers”. The count throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th is verbose; Eduardo Dato and Salvador de Madariaga from A Coruña, José Canalejas from Ferrol or José Calvo Sotelo from Tuense stand out. During the Second Republic, Santiago Casares Quiroga, a Coruña of Compostela descent, presided over the Council of Ministers.
And, after the four decades of the bad leader’s dictatorship, democracy recovered the habit of having “the indispensable Galician ministers”, as they said between jokes and envy during the Franco regime. Miguel Ãngel Moratinos, Elena Salgado, José Manuel Romay BecarÃa, César Antonio Molina, Ana Pastor, Francisco Caamaño, Pepe Blanco or Nadia Calviño are some of them.
Without forgetting the day when an epitome of Santiago de Compostela de la Galeguidade, conservative, serious and hardworking, often indecipherable, reclusive and a bit poor, Mariano Rajoy, achieved what patriarch Fraga never achieved. Feijoo now repeats his script, without even stumbling out of the typism.
While Yolanda DÃaz presents herself as the new bride of Spain, a white brand of the left. And unlike so many country people, he sweetens the Galician essence and makes it ostentatious instead of disguising it. Although his sweetness does not give up such deep-rooted values ​​as pragmatism, stone chipping and even longing for a time when politics and people did not turn their backs on each other.
