Juan Luis Cebrián criticises Sánchez's PSOE and its ‘betrayal of the spirit of the Transition’
- Federal state and open lists
- Betrayal of the spirit of the Constitution
- Cebrián's País
- ‘Chronicle of a disappointment’
- Has Juan Luis Cebrián changed?
‘The PSOE today is not a party, it is a sect, and threatens to become a mafia; it is not a workers‘ party, I don't think Cerdán, Koldo or Tito Berni are workers, nor are any of those who sit on the blue bench; it is not socialist, because it does not defend the general interests of the country; and it is not Spanish, but of all kinds of identities’. This is how blunt the former director of El País, Juan Luis Cebrián, was during the presentation of his book ‘El efecto Sánchez’, published by Ladera Norte.
Accompanied by Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, PP deputy, the academic and writer Félix de Azúa and the publisher Ricardo Cayuela, criticism of Pedro Sánchez's populism and sole interest in staying in power and of nationalism became the protagonists of this event in which there was no shortage of intelligence, humour and irony. Also evident was the concern and the need to promote changes and reforms to recover democratic values and principles that are being lost with this government. ‘There is a direct betrayal of the spirit of the Transition’, said Cebrián.
The Antonio Machado bookshop in Madrid was too small for the audience gathered by this curious trio and the interest in Cebrián's latest work, which compiles numerous articles published between 2019 and 2024 in El País, the newspaper of which he was director from its beginnings until 1988. In them, he pours out his reflections and opinions on polarisation, the referendum in Catalonia, the election of the CGPJ, constitutional reform, press censorship... and the behaviour of President Pedro Sánchez, whom he even compares to Trump. With complete freedom and without mincing words, although perhaps that is why in April he stepped down as honorary president of the newspaper he founded with José Ortega Spottorno and Jesús Polanco in 1976. A pen that The Objetive, which was delighted to open its doors to him, did not let him escape.
As he expressed in the essay ‘Chaos. El poder de los idiotas’, Cebrián reiterated that the world is governed by idiots on both the right and the left, and harshly criticised nationalism, because it is ‘the grave of democracies‘. For him, the important thing is equality under the law, regardless of identity.
In his speech, he also defended freedom of information and freedom of expression, a right, he said, that he has felt ‘like never before’ since his retirement in 2017, as is also reflected in the articles compiled in this book.
However, he stressed that ‘El efecto Sánchez’ is dedicated to Polanco, because he never tried to control the opinions of the columnists of El País, on the contrary, he gave them absolute freedom. In this respect, he regretted that there are now more journalists working for companies trying to stop certain news items being published than journalists dedicated to publishing what they do not want to be published. ‘Journalists know that they have to serve their readers,’ said Cebrián, who described this principle as essential.
Federal state and open lists
Regarding the three changes he proposes in his book, Cebrián defended the reform of Title VIII of the Constitution to create a federal state; that of the electoral law so that lists are not closed and blocked, something he said he has been asking for 30 years; and that of the media, ‘he wants (referring to Sánchez) even to legislate feelings’.
‘I think representative democracy has a general crisis, firstly because there is a change of civilisation generated by the internet. Democracy is something very delicate, very weak, very young and very threatened,’ said Cebrián, who expressed concern about the disappearance of the socialist party in almost all of Europe. ‘Without a democratic social democracy, it is very difficult for a country to live in democracy’, he said. In view of this situation, he pointed out that we should not panic, although we should be aware that we have a problem, and that is that we are governed by idiots; and that we have a change of civilisation that we do not know how to regulate.
Betrayal of the spirit of the Constitution
But his criticisms were not only directed at Sánchez, but also at Zapatero, whom he pointed to as the origin of everything, and whom he accused, with his Law of Historical Memory, of telling a false story of the Civil War, forgetting that it was, precisely, a civil war. ‘There is a direct betrayal of the spirit of the Transition’, said Cebrián, who also wanted to remember those years in which Spain went from Dictatorship to Democracy and all the protagonists who made it possible.
‘The Machados, Antonio and Manuel, are the essence of the Spanish problem, two magnificent poets, who loved each other very much, who wrote in unison. One died in exile in the most painful way, and the other became the leader of the fascist intellectuals, but they still loved each other. They are an example of what the Civil War was all about’, concluded Cebrián. A reflection that leads us to the latest book by the writer Joaquín Pérez Azaústre, ‘El querido hermano’, on the relationship between the Sevillian poets, and where he extols this brotherly love above any ideology.
Cebrián's País
Before Cebrián's speech, the editor of the young imprint Ladera Norte, the Mexican Ricardo Cayuela, opened the event to thank and praise the speakers. Of Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, he stressed that, regardless of whether or not one shares her ideas, ‘she always acts with conviction’ and defined her as an ‘intellectual and political amphibian’.
Of Félix de Azúa, he stressed that he is a figure of Spanish culture and his enjoyment as a reader of his works such as ‘Diccionario de las Artes’, ‘Autobiografía sin vida’ and ‘Autobiografía de papel’; and of Cebrián, that the Transition to Democracy in Spain and the consolidation of its freedoms would not have been the same without El País under his command. He also added that, like everyone at the table, with a foot in politics, in literature, in the world of ideas, he is a great novelist, with one of the best memoirs written in Spain in the second half of the 20th century: ‘Primera página’.
‘Chronicle of a disappointment’
There was no lack of freshness and humour with Félix de Azúa, who said he knew three Juan Luis Cebrián: the director of El País, and there he took the opportunity to explain that newspaper directors have a very curious authority, which comes from the one who controls a business, but who sells strange objects such as justice and freedom, in other words, good information, ‘if you are a good director’, he clarified; the member of the RAE, where he is his colleague and they behave like naughty children who all the time pass on false information; and the work colleague at the newspaper The Objective.
On ‘El efecto Sánchez‘, De Azúa said that ’it is a wonderful chronicle of a disappointment’, a book that explains what has happened in the country from 2018 to 2024 and what has happened to him, and to many, as he saw how a democratic government was turning into a government similar to a tyranny or satrapy, an unpleasant regime, or, as Cebrián says in the book, ‘a whorehouse‘.
The academic stressed that his colleague began to realise this change in 2019 when he saw that Pedro Sánchez ‘was a psychopath’, and realised that we were not facing a government crisis, but that it was the state that was in danger. De Azúa pointed out that if he were 50 years younger he would say that the time has come for civic action.
Has Juan Luis Cebrián changed?
Álvarez de Toledo began by asking what Polanco would have thought if he saw her at this presentation: ‘That Juan Luis has gone mad’, he replied, as he recalled some of the harsh words of the president of Grupo Prisa directed at the PP. Cebrián did not escape Cebrián's darts either, as the deputy put on the table the continuous attacks on her party. She expressed the two reasons why he reminded her of the character Darth Vader: firstly, because of what he said in the play ‘El futuro no es lo que era’, where he talks to Felipe González: ‘The feeling I get is that the PP are happy because they are the same old right wing, they collaborated with the dictatorship because they engendered it...’; and the second reason, because of the article “El discurso del método”, published in El País after the 2001 elections in El País Vasco, in which Cebrián charged against the pact of Nicolás Redondo and Jaime Mayor, a pact that for Álvarez de Toledo was 'a monument to modernity and morality'.
‘Cebrián was Darth Vader until I met him 16 years later, in 2017’, said Álvarez de Toledo, in an interview for El Mundo after the publication of his memoirs. In that interview, said the journalist, they talked about issues such as the independence of Catalonia, the banning of the Catalan referendum, the need for Rajoy's government to apply article 155 or how all populism, whether right-wing or left-wing, generates hatred... ‘Cebrián was a visionary’. Its publication, according to Álvarez de Toledo, was a major uproar, especially for the Prisa leadership, ‘because Cebrián had broken a taboo and a wall: the one that kept the left on the same side of nationalism against the PP or the right’.
Some of those themes appear in ‘El efecto Sánchez’, a book that ‘is probably the most caustic and demolishing impugnation of Sanchezism of any that has ever been published. It is the book of a rightly indignant person’, according to Álvarez de Toledo.
What has happened to the left? What has happened to Juan Luis? How much has the PSOE changed, how much has Juan Luis? ... The MP asked him these questions while giving her opinion: ‘Cebrián has focused and the PSOE has become more extreme. Juan Luis Cebrián is a long way from Sánchez, because he is a democrat, but he is not exactly where he was then’.
These questions were answered: ‘Cayetana is happy because I have changed a lot. I don't think so’, Cebrián began, although he admitted to having evolved. He then went back to 1962, to the publication of ‘Cuadernos para el diálogo’, to explain that even back then he thought that the best system, or the least bad, was the democratic one, he believed in the separation of powers and in a free press, which is what he has striven for in his more than 60 years of professional life.
Álvarez de Toledo ended her turn, but not before affirming that a new politics of citizens for citizens is needed, and that it will demand some essential values close to those defended by Cebrián, such as truth, since without truth there is no democracy, and the value of merit.
Despite the situation that was conveyed at this event, the harsh criticism of Pedro Sánchez and the urgency of important reforms, Cebrián said he was optimistic, ‘because I believe in the people, in civil society’, and advocated recovering the spirit of coexistence.