The “new professional project” for which Toni Cantó decided yesterday to leave his position in the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso as director of the Spanish Office already has a name: 7NN.
The former UPyD y Cs deputy, who signed for the PP in the last regional elections of 2021, has decided to watch the bulls from the sidelines by serving as the presenter of a television network closely linked to the extreme right and seeking to gain a foothold in the DTT-party – alluding to the amalgamation of political and media actors from the US conservatives – where channels such as Trece or El Toro TV already coexist.
Cantó has not been in the PP team of the Community of Madrid for two years. But he has lasted even less in the Spanish Office, the “chiringuito”, as the opposition describes it, in which the regional president gave him shelter after having been included with a shoehorn by the old direction of Genoa.
It was in April 2021 when the former president of the popular formation, Pablo Casado, and his former secretary general, Teodoro García Egea, decided to impose Cantó on the PP electoral ballots for Madrid. All this to the surprise of Ayuso, who did nothing to hide his disagreement although, not having the last word on the preparation of the lists, he ended up swallowing the frog by including it as number 5.
The umpteenth political skydiving exercise, however, was left halfway given that the Justice prevented its inclusion on the lists by not having been registered in Madrid long enough to be “eligible”.
Ayuso got rid of the brown, but only half. She would not have to see Cantó every week in the popular bench of the Madrid Assembly, but she was obliged to make a hole for him in the structure of the regional government.
With the pulse that she maintained with Casado -and that she finally won- still in an embryonic phase, the Madrid leader refused to dispense with one of her own to accommodate the Valencian actor and politician. And she finally chose to appoint him director of the Spanish Office, a newly created body with a single member at a rate of 75,000 euros a year and with such little activity that it did not take long to be the target of opposition.
Cantó’s departure is more of a relief than anything else for Ayuso. The gap that it leaves, in fact, will not even be covered by the Community of Madrid. At least urgently. The few projects initiated by the Spanish Office to “promote the Spanish language inside and outside of Spain, through collaboration with other institutions and the search for synergies with international cultural entities” will be assumed by the Minister of Culture, Marta Rivera de la Cruz .
The announcement of his resignation comes a month before Hispanidad 2022 is held, an event that will take place from October 4 to 12 in Madrid and, for the first time, in Barcelona. With the intention of consolidating itself as a national benchmark for the celebration of the Hispanic language and culture.
