Who is the President?

AZNAR’S “EMBARKATION

J. González Menéndez.

Vigo, 26 November 1989. “ATLANTICO DIARIO”

“He took Jesús Ferreiro, and did with poor Aznar, for a few hours, what Fraga had been doing for a few months: “shipping him off”.

Jesús Ferreiro is that man who accompanies fishermen every morning, like Encarna Sánchez, who at night accompanied the truckers, and has managed to make the sea come to us, flooding our dreams, which in this country that lives with its back to the ocean, is as difficult as if the mountain had once gone to Mohammed.

Apparently, Aznar has put up with the kind of thing, he says, and between three-metre waves, with his stomach swinging from port to starboard, as if it were really an election programme, he has had enough sense of humour to announce to us that very soon he will have a house in Madrid, on the road to A Coruña, as you enter the capital on the right, he, of course.

José María Aznar has already tried to get a flat in Madrid, and you can see how difficult it will be for him, as it is for hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, who have begun to find it easier to get a palace at La Moncloa, although the stubborn entrails of the geese in the polls are determined to predict the opposite.

The fact is that, within two months, Aznar has been “shipped out” twice. In other words, in addition to Jesús Ferreiro, he was also taken on board by Manuel Fraga, in mid-August, when he made him get on board that ship adrift which we still call Genoa Street. You know that, as they say in my country, surrounded by sea everywhere except for the one that links him to the State, where there is a “patron” there is no sailor, and in calle Genova they have been calling that old Galician man whom the rest of us call the old lion of Villalba “The patron” for years.

Man, if that’s the case, then Aznar, who joined up at the last minute, when the winds were less favourable, to take the helm of the Spanish right wing a few months after the electoral “Eurotempest” of 15 July, is not a “ship”, may God come down and see.

Aznar is that 36-year-old boy who will be playing his next thirty-sixth game on 29-0. He had been on “dry land” for three years, in the Community of Castilla-León, and in just one night he was given the title of fishing skipper, of votes, naturally, of the Spanish right wing, and they left in his hands the bitter chalice of writing the next pages of the logbook in Genoa Street, which was plagued with mudslides on the reefs of the ballot boxes.

Jesús Ferreiro has already warned that the boy has endured the kind in the waters of the Mare Nostrum, amidst raging waves that looked like Alfonso Guerra’s spittle in the middle of the electoral storm, and that, instead of vomiting bile, like his entourage, he continued to vomit slogans, word! like a successful sea lion’s apprentice.

Perhaps Josémari Aznar is too hardened to navigate through turbulent waters. That you resist the storms of the Mediterranean as much as the storms that are generated in Genoa street every “day after” an election. Of course, there are no precedents, especially not on the Spanish right, but perhaps, for once, and without any precedent, where there is a “skipper”, he will end up sending a “sailor”.

Be careful: Aznar, who, according to Jesús Ferreiro, does not get seasick, has set sail”.

J. González Menéndez.

Everyone was invited, but José Maria Aznar was the only leader and candidate who agreed to go on board a fishing boat as a crew member.

He spent a day accompanying Jesús Ferreiro and sharing the work on board a ship from Malaga.