Mario Garcés (Jaca, 1967), Secretary of Programs of the Popular Party (PP) and former Secretary of State for Equality, "discharges" from the responsibilities of politics when, after eleven o'clock night, he begins to write "in the kitchen, with an iPad and two fingers."
He publishes Stories from Spain that nobody had told you (Almuzara, 2018), his fourth book, which follows the path that started with Extraordinary episodes of the history of Spain, where he plays with literature and history to divulge episodes and little-known characters from the past. And tells stories from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, accompanying the literary style with the historical moment in which they occur.
In the era of Wikipedia, are there stories to tell?
There are stories that were told to your way. I always distinguish between mythology and timology. There is a lot of historical mythology, characters that become popular phenomena like some that appear in my book: Fernando VII, Lorca, Isabel II, Juana La Loca … And yet, in many of them, more than myths have scams: What you have to do is decipher the moment and see what happened, and from there I put a filter of subjectivity. I aspire to entertain and make known some moments of that hidden story.
In those scams, do you get denial and revisionism?
Negationism, revisionism and political correctness seem lamentable to me. The story is what it is, they are narrated facts. One of the great problems of this country has been to deny history. Spain takes months between the valley (of the fallen) and the fence (border). We have to get out of here. One hundred years ago Lights of Bohemia premiered and there is a scene between Rubén Darío and the Marquis de Bradomín whose dialogue shows us that we remain the same.
Peripheral nationalisms, are not causing the rise of a nationalism Spanish?
I think there have been three crises that have been crowded: security, after 9/11 and the attacks in Europe, which has caused uncertainty about the model of democracy that we have; the second, the economic one, very important, that has provoked a high youth unemployment that makes young people do not believe in the system, and that makes them look for solutions in the corners; and the third, which is more typical of Spain, the identity crisis as a collective. The countries in Europe have overcome their national reality and do not consider it. They believe that there is a tendency toward supranationality rather than internal fragmentation. What we can not deny is that, with the excretions of terrorism and corruption, we have lived the best 40 years of the history of this country. I prefer as an orderly liberal, to lay the foundations of what has worked extraordinarily well, to think of Redemptorist, populist or nationalist approaches that want to break that reality.
Is there a hispanophobia?
There is a sense of denial of the other. In some autonomous communities governed by nationalists, an attempt has been made to look for enemies and they have not done so abroad, but within: the political centrality and the State. When you create an enemy, you reinforce the national component and your collective self. It is a mediocre way to create nationalism, but they have done it. There is a certain hispanophobia and a certain intolerable supremacist discourse. I am liberal and I tend to talk to everyone until they make supremacist or racist statements. From there, whatever he says for me has no value.
The PP will have to negotiate with Vox in Andalusia …
Vox is a party that has to justify what he says and how he says it. The reflections that are made when it is not governed must pass, when it arrives, through the sieve of pragmatism and reality. Vox is a new party that has not gone through a process of adaptation and transformation. The first message of what happened in Andalusia is that there is an opportunity to democratically substitute a kind of elected regime that has prevailed in Andalusia for almost four decades. And I think that opportunity must be seized. Where we have bridges in common with Vox and especially with Citizens, we can reach an agreement. And where we can not reach agreements, we do not do it.
Will you ever write a chronicle of this kind of something that you have lived in politics?
I have lived many things. Being Undersecretary of Development, I experienced the Lorca earthquake, the Germanwings accident, the Santiago de Compostela accident … As secretary of Equality, I spent nights sleeping with the women who went on hunger strike at the Puerta del Sol … Something, by the way , that as someone from the right did, no value was given. If it had been someone from the left, it would be a national hero. In that the policy is very ungrateful. Even so, as Secretary of State, I experienced the greatest feminist wave in history and it seems wonderful to me. There are voices that want to silence him or do not understand, but as a member of the PP I recognize the value of feminism as the first.
"In the primaries of the PP I saw things that I did not like"
And the recent primaries of his party would not give for a chronicle?
I participated in the primaries with the aim of renewing and rearming the party and the liberal center-right. I was the only member of the Government who left in a newspaper, in this one, in 20minutes showing my support for Pablo Casado . But I saw things that I did not like: I realized that many people participated by pure survival. The first ones are good, but they leave wounds in all the groups. You have to sew wounds, which costs, but with will is done. In the background are wounds of ego and pride.
That healing and rearmament, will it arrive in time for the electoral cycle that awaits us in 2019?
I think it's coming. The Andalusian elections have been very favorable and will allow Juanma Moreno to be president of the Board. It is an opportunity for change. And seeing how the political spectrum is evolving in Spain, I see many possibilities for the PP to re-govern shortly. Sanchez, I think, will try to stay and hold until the end of next year.
He speaks as if the result in Andalusia would have been good for his party …
It is true that if we analyze the results individually, we have lost and You have to recognize it. But it is also true that the vote of the right is hyperfragmenting. You also have to understand the emotional waves that occur. We are called to refound the liberal center right in Spain, which can not be a hydra with three heads. And we will do it because we have more base and we are more prepared for it.
Do not you fear that historians will accuse you of trespassing with your books?
A journalist tells me, how many people practice that profession without being so! We must respect the creative activity of any person. I do not pretend to be a historian, but rather the opposite: that historians read me and consider that I have not been wrong. My texts are based on all kinds of sources. Intrusion? Then nobody could write historical novel, for example, except historians.
Where does his passion for history come from?
I consider it a reference: in it we contemplate ourselves in the mirror of reality. And more at a time when history has been too much mingled. There is a retrospective phenomenon where what is counted does not correspond to reality. Melting literature and history is something very interesting, especially at a time when there is quite a historical novel, and quite bad, in this country.
But his own stories are a kind of fiction …
Many of the readers try to discover in each of the chronicles where the truth begins and where the fiction begins. It's a game. What I intend is that literature is not presented as an official, that is not a manual. That there is narrativity and that we see ourselves identified in those characters who, sometimes are not very famous, but who are part of the forge of this country.
Because of its public dimension, it may reach more public than the historians themselves. who bases his chronicles …
Without a doubt. It grieves me that magnificent people who are doing an excellent job in the university do not have the opportunities that I have to promote a work.
A politician who writes is a rarity?
Now it surprises. In my case, it seems that a liberal humanist politician like me has to justify himself and ask for forgiveness. I'm not going to do it and, besides, like a good Aragonese, I'll keep doing it. This book is 'anti-dedicated' to those who are upset that a politician writes. There is a lack of that core of critical and reflexive thought that the political class had in the 70s and 80s. There are comrades in politics who write, but I would like them to be more.
He likes history, but not from that romantic optimum of " any past was better "…
No, many people ask me at what historical moment I would like to have lived. With Fernando VII? But he was a madman! Those of us who live are the best moments of our history, although we are at a critical moment in which we have to decide what we want to happen in the coming years. We are now in a kind of melancholic loop, of spitting in Congress. There is a Spain that spits at the sky, another on the ground marking the territory and another Spain that begins to tire of seeing spit. That Spain that in 15 years, a third will be over 65 and within 40, 200,000 people will have more than a hundred. These are the challenges of this country. That we are breaking the seams when the model has worked very well, hyperfragmenting reality, creating collective psychoses … Let's become strong in what we have been strong and continue moving forward, with more political formations, with alliances and recovering values such as tolerance and covenant. There is a lot of intolerance in Spain, it is almost impossible to reach an agreement with anyone. Those values agreed that there were 40 years I can not find them now.
There are several stories that would be given for movies …
Yes, like the Balmis expedition, that already had a series, but if had in the US already made three or four blockbusters. Or the history of the first exclusively female school, where two of the first women graduated in Spain came out at the end of the 19th century. He was founded by a Puritan and North American woman who settled in Santander and had many problems with the character of the north, Alice Gordon . She is a woman that nobody knows here and who would give for novels and movies. And it is also a very feminist story of improvement.
If Hollywood had those stories, but the Spanish historical cinema does not usually flee these stories and maintains a certain plaintive tone?
Spanish historical cinema has had a problem. During the Franco era, the historical cinema was regime and propaganda. When democracy arrives, we have to settle accounts with the past, which is Francoist propaganda. We have been reviewing the history of the Republic and the Civil War for thirty years. That is very good, but I think it has come to tell the great stories of history as Fernando the Catholic or other similar. Spanish historical cinema has a certain pessimistic and depressing tone. There are anecdotes and beautiful stories.
Someone will say that a PP politician is coming to sell his ideological vision of history …
I do not. Neither when I write, nor when I act in movies, does the politician. I do not carry that bias with me. Writing serves to vent me.
BIO. Mario Garcés
Aragonese politician, lawyer, writer, columnist in 20 minutes and actor. He was Secretary of State for Equality in the Rajoy Government and, currently, is Secretary of Programs of the Popular Party. He has written legal and political manuals and four books. He has also debuted as a film actor.
from Nettech News http://bit.ly/2EHCpB5
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