Isabel Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, and Toni Cantó, at the presentation of the Spanish Office and the next Hispanic Festival 2021, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.Samuel Sánchez
The president of the Community of Madrid has announced this Wednesday that the journalist Ramiro Villapadierna, current head of the Vargas Llosa Chair, will replace Toni Cantó as director of the Office of Spanish.
The decision represents a radical turn in the direction of this controversial entity.
You go from a former congressman with no management experience to a specialist in cultural diplomacy.
From an exactor with no preparation to run the Spanish Office to a former representative of the Instituto Cervantes in Prague and Frankfurt.
And from a politician who jumped from UPyD to Cs, and from Cs to PP, to a professional with a long career in journalism who until now managed the Mario Vargas Llosa chair, dedicated to promoting the cultural universe of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"She has decades of experience in Europe and Latin America in the management of cultural institutions," the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said this Wednesday, thus highlighting everything that was missing from Cantó's curriculum in Villadapierna.
"He has written more than 3,000 publications on Hispanicism and Europeanism," she continued.
"The Office is a commitment to position the region as a world benchmark in Spanish in all areas."
It is a joy and a challenge, for which I thank the counselor @CiudadanaMartaR and the president @IdiazAyuso, for the confidence that comes from being able to contribute my experience in cultural diplomacy to the project of the Office of Spanish of the @ComunidadMadrid.
– Ramiro Villapadierna (@Villapadierna) December 14, 2022
Cantó left his post in September, and by surprise.
After causing an internal crisis in the PP due to its inclusion in Ayuso's lists (a commitment promoted by the leadership of Pablo Casado), the PSOE denounced that it had not registered in time in the region and was left out of the electoral process.
"I am the beach bar," he ironized when the PP rescued him to fill a position with vague competencies, juicy salary and no staff in charge.
A criticism that haunted him until he decided to sign up for 7NN television, close to Vox, and that now he has marked the selection process for his replacement.
The reason?
Ayuso, who bet on the organization in his last electoral program, did not want to feed the accusation that he had created a beach bar.
During the interviews to choose the new director, he met several applicants who claimed to have more resources and personnel.
The regional president refused: she knew that the entire opposition, from Vox to Podemos, was waiting for a similar decision to intensify their criticism of the office, of which a handful of signed agreements and their participation in the organization are barely known as a whole. of the Hispanic Festival.
"This is not an office, this is actually a job within the Ministry of Culture," Ayuso said this week on the Cope network.
“He is not a chiringo, he is a person.
We gave it the name of office so that when it went to other institutions it would have more packaging when it comes to negotiating, talking... but I have not created a beach bar, it is a job position, ”he continued.
And he acknowledged: "Not all the profiles [of applicants for the position] could, because they came from higher up [than the one finally chosen], and they asked to create a structure that I cannot create because we are in times of absolute austerity."
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