The year 2025 ends with a cultural panorama marked by explicit institutional conflicts, a increasing politicization of creative space and a persistent debate about cultural authority, legitimation and visibility.
He most notable episode was the public distance between … Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and Cervantes Institute, unusual for its intensity and the symbolic centrality of the entities involved. Throughout 2025, the statements of the director of Cervantes, Luis García Montero, against the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, revealed a dispute over the leadership of the cultural policy of Spanish, especially with regard to the international projection of the language and the organization of the International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE).
The insistence of the director of Cervantes in his statements provoked the rejection of other academics like Álvaro Pombo or Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who highlighted García Montero’s attempts to “colonize” the institutions of the Spanish language. The RAE also, although for other reasons, caused discontent among those who hoped to see the poet. Luis Alberto de Cuenca as a creditor of the seat “o”, which was refused to him on a new occasion. There was talk of a “linguistic lobby” or a pressure group which would have orchestrated his non-election.
A scent of politicization permeates institutional spaces. A discourse that is making headway in the cultural industries, with for example the withdrawal announced by RTVE from the Eurovision 2026 festival due to the EBU’s decision to authorize Israel to participate, to protest against the situation in Gaza.
In this context, it is appropriate to examine other, more specific examples. One of them is what happened with the audiovisual adaptation of “Anatomy of a Moment”, the series produced by Movistar+ and based on the book by Javier Cercas about the 23-F coup attempt. This acquired a significant institutional dimension when it was officially presented to the Congress of Deputies, in the presence of the President of Government, Pedro Sánchez, as well as political and cultural representatives. It is worth mentioning how the Sonar Festivalpositioned as one of the most important musical celebrations in Spain, suffered the loss of more than thirty artists and a good number of participants in 2025 after the revelation of its relationship with the pro-Israeli investment fund KKR.
The bonfire
Controversy is inherent to culture, there is no doubt about it. What is striking, however, is an escalation of cancellations in the debate of ideas. These days, Juan Soto Ivars is giving new clues about the extent to which a book can be removed from its original reading and thrown elsewhere. This month he published “It doesn’t exist. False complaints of gender violence (Debate), an essay in which he questions the legal, media and political treatment of false complaints under the gender violence law in Spain and suffered a strong response from feminist groups and political representatives, who accused him of diverting attention from the real victims of gender-based violence, which led to protests and demands for the cancellation of some public presentations, such as the one organized in Seville.
Luisgé Martín, who worked with Pedro Sánchez, was the subject of fierce censorship from the same people with whom he shared his political and intellectual enterprise.
It was also permanently subject to censorship ‘Hate’a book by Luisgé Martín which reconstructs the crime of José Bretón based on 60 letters sent from prison and a personal meeting with the author. After the book was released to the press, Ruth Ortiz, mother of the murdered children, denounced the fact that the work gives a voice to the criminal without having informed him, which led the Córdoba prosecutor’s office to open proceedings and transfer the case to Barcelona. He the book has been withdrawn from the market. Anagrama has voluntarily renounced its publication. It was particularly curious that Luisgé Martín, who worked in Moncloa with the president Pedro Sanchezwho played a leading role in communicating the left-wing feminist movement and eventually headed the Cervantes Institute in Los Angeles, became the object of such fierce censorship from the very people with whom she shared her political and intellectual enterprise.
Cultural non-civilization has taken the most diverse forms, one of which has been the imposition of certain official criteria on artistic disciplines such as bullfighting. It is also worth emphasizing, because it is obvious, the belligerence of the Ministry of Culture, represented in Ernest Urtasunwhich continues to exclude it from National Awards and Gold Medals for Fine Arts, even if, according to the Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain, 3.4 million Spaniards attended bullfighting shows last year, a figure much higher than previous records: in 2018-2019 there were 3.1 million; in 2014-2015, 3.7 million; in 2010-2011, 3.3 million; in 2006-2007, 3.7 million and in 2002-2003, 3 million.
Fixation on the subject has reached the point of veto of the ministry to include the Sevillian bullfighter, writer and patron Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in the National Commission for the Commemoration of the Centenary of the 27 Generation, ignoring his mediation in the formation of the group itself.
The homily
There is an increasingly visible phenomenon of Spain as a cultural node: the sustained increase in the production, programming and circulation of cultural content created by Ibero-American authorsparticularly in literature, essays, performing arts and thought. According to data from the Ministry of Culture and Madrid City Hall, more than 30 percent of international literary activities scheduled in Madrid’s public centers in 2024-2025 were led by creators from Latin America.
In addition to receiving an important migratory waveSpain has become an institutional and symbolic space for exposing historical, political and social conflicts – structural violence, memory, archives, femicide, postcolonialism –, an increasingly visible cultural manifestation, for different reasons: from growing Ibero-American immigration, to a scenario marked by the insistence of historical reparations, whose drift has been to a certain extent paternalistic.
A few weeks ago, Ernest Urtasun presented an ambitious investment of 13.6 million euros from the Ministry of Culture to erase “decolonial thinking” from its museums. In October of this year, the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, reiterated her apologies to Spain for the abuses committed during the conquest. The “Ibero-Americanization” – and it must be said – of culture produces happy synergies; one of them is the weight of the Spanish language as a whole. As part of the International Booker Prize, dedicated to fiction translated into English, the long list of thirteen titles for 2025 included the Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, the data was highlighted by various cultural media as revealing a sustained trend: the Latin American narrative – and therefore translated from Spanish – maintains a growing presence.
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