Due to the determination with which he has been taking control of the departments of Culture in those town halls in which he has entered hand in hand with the PP – and to which, as of Monday, he will add the council of the Valencian Community that will fall on the Former bullfighter Vicente Barrera–, it was to be expected that Vox would have perfectly worked out its cultural ideology for 23-J. But, for the moment, there is no trace.
There is neither a section as such in the 178-page program that he showed at the start of the campaign, nor was anything similar presented last Monday in an act that, paradoxically, the ultranationalists publicized with the sole purpose of making it known. The staging was so limited that of the little that Santiago Abascal recounted, only the motto under which Vox understands the matter stood out: “Protect and exalt the things of Spain.”
The lack of a program and the simplicity of purposes could seem contradictory after hearing the Vox candidate for the presidency of the Government proclaim his commitment to “defend culture above all else.” Even promising, for this purpose, to shield the ministry of the branch in case of reaching Moncloa in the face of the vacillations of Alberto Núñez Feijóo (PP), who is studying the option of relegating the Ministry of Culture to the Secretary of State as in his day already Mariano Rajoy did for the sake of austerity.
But there is nothing contradictory or improvisational. Because, unlike the Ministry of Equality, where Vox’s plan is to dissolve it until all traces are eliminated, what Abascal plans with culture is simply to appropriate it and reduce it to a simmer to pontificate a cultural war from the top. with which to indoctrinate the country. This is deduced from his commitment to close the regional television stations – which, in practice, would stifle the financing and production of multicultural cinemas and series – in order, in exchange, to broadcast only what the executive decides through Televisión Española.
“Aid to culture must be understood within the general framework of tax reductions, and also direct aid, but give up all hope for the subsidy professionals who have made the cultural industry the lucrative business of a few to hijack it with ideological interests” , has promised Abascal, who, on the contrary, does not seem to see any bias in his proposal to refocus TVE to “disseminate and protect the national identity and the contribution of Spain to civilization and universal history, with special attention to the exploits of our national heroes.
Pending what the polls decide next Sunday, this appropriation that Vox longs for has already begun to be carried out in towns in Madrid and Castilla y León where their respective Culture councilors have canceled plays by Virginia Woolf (Orlando) and Alberto Conejero (The Sea: Vision of Children Who Have Never Seen It) for giving voice to characters who change their sex and to Republican teachers who were shot, respectively. Sources close to the ultranationalist party justify their strategy with the aphorism that what is not seen does not exist. And, under this premise, the ultra party has also canceled, among others, the subscription of the Burriana City Council to both Cavall Fort and another series of magazines in Catalan because, they argue, “they promote separatism.”
In exchange, Vox proposes to recover the broadcasts of bullfighting festivities on RTVE. And for this he has tried to irritate the left, paraphrasing Federico García Lorca when he defined bullfighting as “the only place where you go with the security of seeing death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty.”
But the list does not end there. Following in the Trumpist wake of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Abascal has joined the ultra-conservative crusade launched against Disney. In public, he justifies his boycott of the entertainment multinational for “sexualizing children at a very early age.” Although the reason why his party has withdrawn the screening of the children’s film Lightyear from the programming of a summer cinema in the Cantabrian town of Bezana is because it contains a kiss between two female characters.
This list of cancellations has knocked out the people of culture. The same one that in 2008, when what are now reprisals were only threats, mobilized massively brandishing the eyebrow that identified the then socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has shown symptoms of paralysis. And it has not been until the campaign has already begun when, from the recently created Plataforma Artes Libres –promoted from the performing arts environment–, it has raised its voice against the “return of censorship”. The appeal, however, worries the collective more than Vox when wondering if the reaction has not come “too late”.
