That the presence in Spain of the President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenskyincludes the visit, accompanied by the president Pedro Sanchesfor the Guernica of Picasso at the Reina Sofía Museum, in Madrid, is no coincidence.
The visit to the painting follows from that videoconference that Zelensky offered to the two legislative chambers meeting at the Congress of Deputies in April 2022.
In it, Zelensky began, to the surprise and emotion of everyone gathered there, and with the horrendous images of the massacred bodies in the streets of Bucha still in our retinas, saying “we are in April 2022, but it seems like 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 by the genius of Málaga, considered the most important of contemporary times due to its artistic, historical and political connotations, marks not only Zelensky’s visit to Spain, but also the situation of President Pedro Sánchez, now that Junts has announced that he will no longer support him in Congress.
We therefore find ourselves with a government in a parliamentary minority and with an opposition that could, if it so proposed, execute laws against the criteria of the Executive itself. Something extraordinarily abnormal in any democratic political system comparable to ours..
Pedro Sánchez would undoubtedly like to see himself, if it were up to him, as the protagonist of the painting. Bombarded 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, without a doubt, be to use Picasso’s painting to give plastic expressiveness to his current situation of minority and suffering. What to do, other than regret your fate and, yes, continue occupying the government until the end of your term?
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, the reconciliation between the Spanish people after the period of dictatorship and the beginning of the Transition.
Quite the opposite of what he, with his democratic memory plan and his construction of walls and digging 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 John Carlos very current for his memories, which are the clear sign of his interest in returning to what he considers his homeland, Spain, it is worth remembering the decisive role he had in the advent of Guernica to Madrid, 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, so that the painting finally reached the homeland of those 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, clearly saw the country’s democratic exit and the satisfaction of the artist’s wishes. that painting returned to Spain as soon as this regime change was achieved.
And it could not have been any other way, taking into account the involvement with which King Juan Carlos assumed his reign, in terms of the implementation and consolidation of democracy in Spain.
Something that, without a doubt, It is the best legacy any president would dream of leaving his country after a period of forty years of dictatorship..
“The return of Guernica to Spain meant that our country had wiped the slate clean”
Nothing he did later in his private life could erase this achievement. The arrival of Guernica to 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 phase in which the painting was exhibited in the rooms of MoMA in New York, and after the travels and sectarian uses it has suffered since the end of the Civil War, those responsible for the New York museum placed a plaque 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 denied any political significance, simply stating that the mural expressed his aversion to war and brutality.
The fact that the painting returned to Spain meant that our country had wiped the slate clean, that those who left were integrated with those who stayed and that the political regime that King Juan Carlos represented was broad and deep enough to accommodate all possible opinions.
Because we had a non-militant Constitution, unlike others in our immediate environment, that allowed us to think whatever we wanted. Even go against the Constitution itself, as long as it is done through peaceful means and obtains the necessary majority support.
Even today it seems that many people do not realize how important this achievement was and how elastic our Magna Carta is to cushion all blows.
And we still have parties and internal currents within these parties that even seek to replace the regime we gave ourselves then with a much more sectarian, limited and narrow one.
I don’t believe that Pedro Sánchez, in front of Guernica by Picasso, you realize the enormous power that that painting radiates and how much it meant to seal concord and reconciliation among the Spanish people.
Furthermore, you will think that you are facing yet another belligerent element to confront the dictatorship of Franco and the danger of the far right, as he says.
But the Spanish understand the profound message that the painting conveys, the atmosphere that surrounded it when it arrived in Spain. and the influence that King Juan Carlos had on him.
*** Pedro Chacón is professor of History of Political Thought.
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