MEP and former Foreign Affairs Minister José Manuel García-Margallo will launch his next book on January 23, Heterodox Memories of a Politician of Extreme Center (Peninsula Editions), a journey through his life in which he reviews his long career policy as "witness and protagonist of the most important national and international issues of the last forty years".

A good number of anecdotes are not missing in this review in a critical tone of his stage as a parliamentarian - first from 1994 to 2011 and currently since 2019 - nor of his period as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation during the governments of Mariano Rajoy (2011 -2016), where it does not hide the “strictly political” discrepancies that it maintained with the then Vice President of the Government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.

As in Ten Bold , the black novel by Agatha Christie in which none of the guests to the Isle of Black is saved, the former minister recounts the fall, one by one, of the men closest to the then president Mariano Rajoy . It was no accident, as he recounts in the book, explaining that Miguel Arias Cañete confessed to them that "Soraya was convinced that she would be Rajoy's substitute." And that's why I didn't want competition. There began the isolation, explained in chapter 18, The internal policy of the Foreign Minister , to which THE WORLD has had access and from which we advance an excerpt below:

The ten little blacks: Sáenz de Santamaría perpetrates the fall of the G-8

«From my ministerial era, one of the aspects that I remember the worst is that my projects and my legislative work were stalled in the commission of secretaries and undersecretaries presided by the vice president, and that, if they finally exceeded that Rubicon, they did not have sufficient economic endowment to carry them out. He was not the only one who tripped on the same stone.

At the dawn of our governmental journey, we met at home the group of those affected, a group of friends among whom were Miguel Arias Cañete (Agriculture), Ana Pastor (Development), Jorge Fernández Díaz (Interior), José Manuel Soria ( Industry) and me. Then José Ignacio Wert (Culture), Rafael Catalá (Justice) and Isabel García Tejerina (substitute for Miguel Arias in Agriculture) were incorporated. The press started talking about the G-5 which, with the latest additions, became known as the G-8. Of course, the vice president never sympathetically saw this group and vice versa. In one of the first meetings, Miguel Arias took off explaining that Soraya was convinced that she would be Rajoy's substitute. Therefore, I was determined to gradually isolate those who considered us closest to him ».

Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón: Campaign of media agitation and withdrawal of the abortion law

«The first of the fallen was Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, at that time a value both with projection and prestige and with presidential deeds. The operation against him began on the same initial day of the legislature, when Soraya told him that he wanted to take care of himself - in an operation similar to what he did in Defense when she stayed with the control of the CNI - of the State Legal Service. Naturally, Ruiz-Gallardón said that, under these conditions, he was not a minister. In a row, Soraya insisted on agreeing with him the appointment of the General Director of the Legal Service and the Attorney General. Gallardón told him that he would talk to the President.

Soraya set up a campaign of media agitation on the slowness of justice and its need for reforms of all kinds. Gallardón did not get uprooted, rolled up his sleeves and prepared to undertake that modernization. But they immediately told him there would be no money for that. "If you want to do it, apply court fees and eliminate the defense ex officio," they advised. Ruiz-Gallardón had no choice but to opt for this route, which was fatal and then they threw all the press on him. The Minister was losing oxygen until he realized that he was politically dead and decided, as a last resort, to get involved in the controversial flag of abortion, arguing that the electoral commitment had to be fulfilled. Immediately, the controversy reached such a degree that Rajoy made him withdraw the bill and he had no choice but to resign. One less rival ».

Miguel Arias Cañete: he went to Brussels tired of seeing his projects lying down

«The next on the list was a close friend of Rajoy, Miguel Arias Cañete, a politician of great prestige, who one day told me that he was going to Europe or home, but that« he was not willing to continue in the Ministry and take away one more disgust seeing how the commission of undersecretaries laid him down project after project or how Montoro completely turned off the tap ». Arias went to Brussels. Second opponent voided ».

José Ignacio Wert: defeated in the battle of the offensive against the LOMCE

«It was followed by José Ignacio Wert, who suffered more injuries in the battle for education than the riders of the Alcantara regiment on the Igán river. The offensive against the LOMCE by the left was brutal, and the worst part was that the most similar media left him alone. The Government formed at the end of 2016 suppressed the national assessments, which means that the system will remain blind - and, therefore, will not be able to identify lagged students - and also that the lowering of degrees will dry cut the incipient improvement of the school performance observed between 2011 and 2015. But the worst thing is that there will be no homogeneous scale nationwide ».

José Manuel Soria, discrepancies around private TV licenses

«José Manuel Soria was the fourth objective. I have always believed that it was his discrepancies with the vice president in regard to private television licenses, which Zapatero had granted by finger without the mandatory public tender, which precipitated his downfall. When the Supreme annulled those irregular concessions, a public contest had to be opened. Soria and Soraya did not share the same criteria on what had to be done and how it should be carried out, so the discrepancies were increasing until the first one left the Government. Another less ».

Jorge Fernández Díaz: closely linked to Rajoy, he still doesn't understand why he came out

«Then it was Jorge Fernández Díaz , the Interior Minister, a man linked to Mariano Rajoy from his first political steps and who still does not quite understand why what happened to him happened. The fact that Jorge has given birth to his memories very recently excuses me from further comments.

The fifth was me.

Thus, all the members of the G-8 - except Pastor, García Tejerina and Catalá - were left out of the cabinet that Rajoy formed after the 2016 elections. As in Agatha Christie's novel entitled Ten Bold , there were no survivors. To end with urban legends, I hasten to say that the discrepancies between Soraya and I were strictly political.

Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría has a well furnished head and a huge capacity for work, but we did not share political opinions. Among other frictions, we did not agree on the need to undertake the reform of public administrations - central, regional, local and Social Security - or the radical reform of our tax system. But the biggest discrepancies were the constitutional reform and the Catalan question ».

Catalonia as a "discrepancy" with the Government

Margallo collided with the Executive for alerting of the Diada and agreeing to discuss with Junqueras

Not only García-Margallo uses the fall of the G-8 to throw darts against Sáenz de Santamaría. In the same chapter, under the epigraph 'Catalonia, my great discrepancy', the former minister criticizes the desire of the former vice president to "maintain the monopoly of the Catalan question", after statements in which he criticized the government's action against the separatism after the Day of 2012. «I said that it had been a success of organization and mobilization and that the Catalan question was once again important. Those statements sat badly in the Government. The vice president thought I was getting into a field that was not mine.

Then, on November 9, 2014, Margallo presented his proposals on Catalonia at the Europa Press Forum. «I requested that the Generalitat of Catalonia be required to seize and destroy the ballot boxes and ballots that were being made in a prison in Lleida . I added that, in the more than probable assumption that the Generalitat did nothing, the Government applied article 155, placing the Mossos d'Esquadra at the orders of the Ministry of Interior for the time necessary to do so. I advocated acting like this and that, at the same time, a dialogue be opened on the reform of the Constitution - not to give them satisfaction - and that we debate publicly on the issue of language and culture, on infrastructure and also on the financing system with co-responsibility ».

But the other major conflict with the Government because of Catalonia was due to a televised debate with Oriol Junqueras that Margallo accepted "without hesitation."

«That clashed with the desire of the vice president to maintain the monopoly of the Catalan question, and with which Rajoy has always believed that talking about Catalonia was to excite the issue. Soon, during a trip to the United States, Rajoy called me and asked me: "Is it true that you have committed to debate with Junqueras?" "Yes, president," I admitted, "someone has to show their face and explain what our reasons are." Someone has to convince them that they are not going anywhere ... ». "But it is very dangerous," he warned me. "I do what you want. But I would not like the indepes to believe that we have no arguments or that we dare not oppose Spain's reasons to theirs. "Let me think about it," Rajoy told me. When he hung up, his chief of staff, Jorge Moragas , called me to move me that now at this point it was worse not to go and that, although they didn't like anything, canceling it was counterproductive. In the debate «cordiality prevailed. It came without low blows and all personal appeal was complimentary, "recalls Margallo, who does not doubt that he would" debate again. "

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Know more

  • Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría
  • Mariano Rajoy
  • Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón
  • Miguel Arias Cañete
  • José Manuel Soria
  • Jorge Fernandez Diaz
  • José Ignacio Wert
  • LOMCE
  • Rafael Catalá
  • José Manuel García-Margallo
  • Social Security
  • Ana Pastor
  • Soria
  • Isabel Garcia Tejerina
  • Europe

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