For the determination with which he has been taking control of the councils of culture in the councils where he entered together with the PP – and to which, from Monday, he will add the council of the Valencian Community, which will fall on the extorero Vicente Barrera -, it was to be expected that Vox had perfectly worked out the cultural ideology for the 23- J. But, at the moment, there is no sign of it.
There is no such section in the 178-page program that he showed at the start of the campaign, nor was anything similar presented on Monday in an event that, paradoxically, the ultranationalists publicized with the sole purpose of giving to know The staging was so limited that, from the little that Santiago Abascal revealed, the only thing that stood out was the motto by which Vox understands the matter: “Protect and exalt the things of Spain”.
The lack of a program and the simplicity of purposes could seem contradictory after hearing how Vox’s candidate for the presidency of the government proclaimed the commitment to “defend culture above all”. Even as he promised, for this purpose, to shield the counterpart Ministry in the case of reaching Moncloa in the face of the hesitations of Alberto Núñez Feijóo (PP), who envisages the option of relegating the portfolio of Culture to Secretary of State, as Mariano Rajoy once did in the name of austerity.
But there is nothing contradictory or improvisational. Because, unlike the Ministry of Equality, in which Vox’s plan is to dissolve it to the point of eliminating any trace of it, what Abascal proposes with culture is, quite simply, to appropriate it and reduce it simmering to pontificate from above a cultural war with which to indoctrinate the country.
It follows from the bet to close the autonomous television stations – which, in practice, would suffocate the financing and production of multicultural cinemas and series – to, instead, broadcast only what the Executive decides through Televisió Española .
“The aid to culture must be understood in the general framework of tax reductions, and also of direct aid, but the subsidy professionals who have made the cultural industry the lucrative business of a few to hijack it with ideological interests”, promised Abascal, who, on the contrary, seems to see no bias in the proposal to refocus TVE to “disseminate and protect the national identity and Spain’s contribution to civilization and universal history, with special attention to the exploits of our national heroes”.
Awaiting what the polls decide on Sunday, the appropriation that Vox longs for has already begun to be implemented in cities in Madrid and Castilla y León, where the culture councilors have canceled plays by Virginia Woolf (Orlando) and by Alberto Conejero ( The sea: vision of children who have never seen it ) to give voice to characters who change sex and to republican teachers who were shot, respectively. Sources close to the ultra-nationalist party justify the strategy with the aphorism that “What is not seen does not exist”. And, with this premise, the ultra party has also annulled, among others, the subscription of Borriana City Council to both Cavall Fort and another series of magazines in Catalan because, they argue, “they promote separatism” .
Instead, Vox proposes to recover the broadcasts of bullfights on RTVE. And, for this reason, he has tried to irritate the left by paraphrasing Federico García Lorca when he defined bullfighting as “the only place where you can be sure to see death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty”.
But the list doesn’t end there. Following the Trumpist line of the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, Abascal has joined the ultra-conservative crusade against Disney. In public, he justifies the boycott of the entertainment multinational for “sexualizing children at a very early age”. Although the reason why the 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.
The list of cancellations has left culture people out of action. 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 wasn’t until the campaign had already begun when, since the creation of the Free Arts Platform – driven by the performing arts -, he raised his voice against the “return of censorship”. The call, however, worries the collective more than Vox, who wonders if the reaction has not arrived “too late”.
