That the presence in Spain of the president of Ukraine, Volodímir Zelenskiincludes the visit, accompanied by the president Pedro Sanchezal Guernica of Picasso at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid is not at all coincidental.
The visit to the painting derives from that videoconference that Zelensky offered to the two legislative chambers meeting in the Congress of Deputies in April 2022.
In it, Zelensky began, to the surprise and emotion of all those gathered there, and with the horrendous images of the bodies massacred in the streets of Bucha still in our retinas, saying “we are in April 2022, but it seems that we are in April 1937, when the whole world knew the name of a Spanish city, Guernica”.
A painting of such colossal iconic power as the painting of the genius of Malaga, considered the most important of contemporary times due to its artistic, historical and political connotations, not only marks Zelensky’s visit to Spain, but also the situation of President Pedro Sánchez, now that Junts has announced that it will no longer support him in Congress.
We find ourselves, therefore, with a government in a parliamentary minority and with an opposition that could, if it so proposed, carry out laws against the criteria of the Executive itself. Something extraordinarily abnormal in any democratic political system comparable to ours..
Pedro Sánchez, without a doubt, would want to see himself, if it were up to him, as the protagonists of the painting. Bombed by the opposition and now also by the old majority that supported him.
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, greets Pedro Sánchez during the last European Council on October 23.
His intention will be, without a doubt, to use Picasso’s painting to give plastic expressiveness to his current minority and suffering situation. What to do, except regret your fate and, yes, continue occupying the government until the term is over?
But how? Only he knows that.
See Pedro Sánchez in front of the Guernica It means something very different from what he intends. Because if he Guernica It represents something, above all and above all, the reconciliation between the Spanish people after the period of the dictatorship and the very beginning of the Transition.
Quite the opposite of what he, with his democratic memory plan and his erection of walls and excavation of trenches, intends to do, rescuing the Cainite spirit of the two Spains that faced each other in the Civil War.
Now that we have the emeritus Juan Carlos very topical for his memoirs, which are the obvious sign of his interest in returning to what he considers his home, Spain, it is worth remembering the decisive role he had in the coming of the Guernica to Madrid, back at the beginning of the Transition.
Because the arrival of Guernica Spain had a lot to do with the work of King Juan Carlos, who helped, with his international prestige, for the painting to finally end up in the homeland of the person who painted it.
This is what he recognized Roland DumasPicasso’s lawyer, who was then his executor of his will and who, after meeting with King Juan Carlos in 1978, saw clearly the democratic exit of the country and the satisfaction of the artist’s wishes. that the painting returned to Spain once this change of regime was achieved.
And it could not have been any other way, taking into account the involvement with which King Juan Carlos took his reign, in terms of the implementation and consolidation of democracy in Spain.
Something that, without a doubt, It is the best legacy that any president would dream of leaving his country after a period of forty years of dictatorship..
“That Guernica returned to Spain meant that our country had wiped the slate clean”
Nothing he did later with his private life can erase that achievement. The arrival of Guernica to the Barajas airport from New York on September 10, 1981 came to mean, according to the headline ABC“the return of the last exile.”
During the last stage in which the painting was hanging in the rooms of the MoMA in New York, and after the travels and sectarian uses that it had suffered since the end of the Civil War, those responsible for the New York museum placed a sign next to the privileged space where it was exhibited, which said: “There have been many and often contradictory interpretations of the painting. Guernica. Picasso himself has denied any political significance, simply stating that the mural expresses his abhorrence of war and brutality.
That the painting returned to Spain meant that our country had wiped the slate clean, that those who left were integrated with those who had stayed and that the political regime that King Juan Carlos represented was wide and deep enough to accommodate all possible opinions.
Because we had a non-militant Constitution, unlike others in our immediate environment, which allowed us to think whatever we wanted. Even go against the Constitution itself, provided that it is done through peaceful means and that it obtains the necessary majority support.
Even today it seems that many people have not realized how important that achievement was and how elastic our Magna Carta is to cushion all blows.
And we still have parties and internal currents within those parties that even seek to replace the regime we gave ourselves then with another much more sectarian, limited and narrow one.
I do not believe that Pedro Sánchez, in front of the Guernica by Picasso, you realize the enormous power that that painting radiates and how much it meant to seal concord and reconciliation between the Spanish people.
What’s more, he will think that he is facing another belligerent element to face the dictatorship of Franco and the danger of the extreme right, as he says.
But the Spaniards do perceive the deep message that the painting transmits, the atmosphere that surrounded it when it arrived in Spain. and the influence that King Juan Carlos had on it.
*** Pedro Chacón is a professor of History of Political Thought.