The Aula Magna of the Cultural Center La Nau of the University of Valencia remained small yesterday to welcome all the public who wanted to attend the presentation in Valencia of the book “España, el pacto y la furia” (Arpa) by the delegate of La Vanguardia in Madrid, Enric Juliana. An event in which the author was accompanied by the journalists Paco Cerdà and Salvador Enguix and with the presence of Cristina García, coordinator of the Aula de Narratives de La Nau.
In the presentation, Juliana highlighted her motivation to write a book that concentrates the work of twenty years of work as an observer of Spanish reality from Madrid. “They have been the twenty most intense years of my journalistic life,” explained the journalist. A period that began a few weeks after the 11M attacks, in 2004, and in which all the political events that explain, among others, the current situation in Spain are recounted. Juliana brings us closer to the episodes, to the moments, that originally polarized society and in which all the subsequent events, which have been many and intense in these two decades. The work begins with a premonitory phrase: “In the beginning was the lie.”
In the period he recounts, from 2004 to the present day, the journalist explained that there has been a “debasement of politics in Spain,” which is why the book aims to be “a portrait of these twenty years of high intensity of politics that “They are, in reality, the unfolding of the 21st century in Spain.”
Paco Cerdà, who in addition to being a journalist is the author of works such as “El peón” (Pumpkin seeds) or “April 14” (Libros de Asteroid) highlighted the qualities of Enric Juliana as a journalist using a basketball player as a simile, a sport which the Catalan journalist has been passionate about all his life. For Cerdà, Juliana has known how to work in Madrid as a “race correspondent, who takes the right distance”, with a style of political chronicler that has made him a reference throughout Spain; At the same time, he highlighted his passion for “maps” and his ability to interpret political reality. He defined him as “an intellectual, statesman and a thinker” with an “invariable versatility.”
In addition, he stressed that Juliana has written several books with the name “Spain” on the cover. In this regard, the Catalan journalist made it clear that “there are many ways of understanding Spain and it is legitimate for each person to defend their position, but I have no problem talking about Spain.”
Salvador Enguix highlighted that in this book Juliana “brings us closer to the episodes, to the moments, that in their origin polarized society and in which all the subsequent events, which have been many and intense in these two decades, remitted in one another way to that embryonic idea of ??the work: in the beginning it was the lie.” “A lie that has drawn deep furrows through which mudflats circulate that permeate Spanish politics to the point of making it, at times, unbreathable. With the epicenter, what the author calls Madrid DF, the epicenter of a system, also a media system, that rarely pays attention to or understands what happens in the peripheries.”
Enric measures in his work what has happened in Spain in those two decades through the articles, and in each of these texts the reader immediately understands what would happen years later, and that the author also relates. All the events are related, sometimes to international influence, very present and detailed in the book.
After “The Trauma”, title of the first chapter, we move on to the origins of the Catalan conflict, with the management of that Statute that would end up being mutilated by the Constitutional Court, with the already known consequences of the process, the serious events of October 2017, and a serialized sequence that offered one of its new chapters this Sunday with the Catalan elections, and it will not be the last. The end of ETA, the brick crisis, with special mention of what it meant in the Valencian Community, and the role of the European troika that put the Spanish Government of Mariano Rajoy in check; the origin of 15M and the appearance of a party that would end up hitting the entire system and questioning the regime of ’78, Podemos.
Or the assassination in the federal committee of the PSOE of Pedro Sánchez and the reconquest of power of a man who has starred in Spanish politics in recent years. A whole seasoned with enormous sensitivity and with abundant historical and literary references, which turn each piece into a brilliant exercise in journalism committed to the truth, far from speculation and which even allows us to re-read those almost dreamlike conversations of Enric Juliana. with “Reaper”, the head of the talking bull that acts as an oracle after consuming a good gazpacho.
