The announcement of the interview with Pedro Sánchez in Al rojo vivo (La Sexta) is a metaphor for the electoral method: the promotion promises that it will be at eleven, then at twelve and finally the interview starts at 12:32 . Lie? No: biased handling of the truth. Antonio Garcia Ferreras obsessively asks about the Amnesty law, which the president defines as “courageous, restorative and constitutional”.
Following the advice of the most primary commercial rhetoric, Sánchez repeats “Antonio” as a preventive lubricant against possible hostilities. Place a message on each answer. Returning to the Amnesty law, he says, referring to the PP, that terrorism cannot be trivialized but neither can it be misrepresented. It defines Spain as a difficult country to govern if territorial diversity and political plurality are not taken into account. “The PSOE is the only organization that can govern this complexity”, he adds. And, without losing her hair, when Ferreras asks her about the Zorra that will represent TVE at the Eurovision festival, she smiles, says that feminism is fun and that the fathosfera would love to present Cara al sol. If Ferreras was looking for a headline about the amnesty, this festive-musical comment will, I suspect, make a lot more noise.
In Lo de Évole (La Sexta), the singer and actress Ana Belén laments that in the Community of Madrid the fetish of freedom ends up confronting communism. Belén says that between having an aperitif and having a decent public healthcare, it is better to do without the aperitif. It’s the typical lazy tabletop trickster dilemma (in fact, they discuss it over an aperitif), but Belén accepts the rules of Jordi Évole, who persists in the back shots and nape-of-the-neck lyricism that the Dardenne brothers introduced to their cinema and that today is a common place. Conversation, on the other hand, works and comforts. The tributaries of nostalgia relativize the personality cults of the transition through the contrast between past and present, memory and opinion, banality and responsibility.
Belén is not only a singer and actress. It is the symbol of a cultured, committed, promising (and probably failed) Spain that in the sentimental education of a few maintains iconographies such as that of Ana (with a Quilapayune poncho harvested in 1977) and Víctor Manuel (example of the superiority of the human factor and camaraderie over left-wing sectarian cannibalism) with Horacio Fernández Inguanzo, El Paisano. All three embody an anti-Francoism in which, based on communist discipline, each chose the degree of commitment that suited them. Évole participates in this fraternal memory with the impatience of wanting to equate himself – perhaps with too invasive a zeal – with the symbolic burden of his interlocutor.
