The great night of José María Aznar

We saw them enter between eight and nine at night.

Most politicians, some businessmen.

We saw them because, like his daughter's wedding twenty years ago, the private celebration had also taken on a public dimension.

It is true that the former mayor Ana Botella wanted her husband's birthday party to be a surprise, and we would not have found out, but there were many fancy names, part of the list of 200 guests circulated and last Saturday photographers and chroniclers waited before a side door of the Teatro Real.

It was the Villa and court, although this time a royal wedding would not be staged like then.

It was about recognizing the patriarchal place that former president José María Aznar occupies in the power nucleus of the Spanish right.

The recognition of their own and their assumption of that role.

There were family and friends and,

between ties and elegant mauve-colored dresses, the reunion of a mature elite who shared dinner with the heirs they have designated and protect.

Rajoy and Casado were not present.

Yes Almeida and Ayuso, who arrived with Miguel Ángel Rodríguez.

It is true that some have fallen along the way, been ousted or condemned, but his closest circle was with him that night in one of the spaces in the Real where events are organized.

It is demagogic to characterize them as a caste.

It is not that and it is also a populist simplification that prevents us from understanding what its importance and influence has been and is.

There were those who should be there to display themselves as a ruling class that recognizes itself as such.

This Aznarismo ruling class, which was compacted around him during the years in the Presidency of the Government, has been the most relevant in the Spain of the 21st century.

They triumphed.

They finally had a modern party, a refounded political culture, a model of society.

They had an idea of ​​Spain, and of Spain's place in the world, which they wanted to make hegemonic, and to a large extent they succeeded.

In the best chronicle of the party that I have read, of course the one in

, it is said that the guests brought gifts in Hermes or Fulham bags.

They are forms of social capital.

From the shared awareness of knowing that it is not only what you know that matters but also who you know.

That night the president of Endesa or Repsol, the executive director of one of the main companies of the magnate Murdoch or the former secretary of the Treasury of the United States or the former president of Mexico or Colombia could bring the gifts.

At the time of the speeches, the first to speak was former minister Ángel Acebes, a member of Iberdrola's board of directors.

A longtime friend followed, Juan Hoyos Martínez de Irujo, an independent director of Ferrovial.

According to Pedro J. Ramírez, who was there, Aznar spoke little and quoted two verses from a sonnet by Manuel Machado.

Not the first of the final tercet (“It is enough that Spain reads on your coat of arms”), but the following hendecasyllables: “He who does not rave does not know about love”, “He who does not fight does not know about living”.

One dedicated to his wife and the second, which closes the poem, as a self-portrait.

It is not easy to identify the poem.

It was published for the first time in March 1942 in the Falange's main intellectual platform: the

.

It took decades to compile into a book.

It was one of the three that a group of friends dedicated to the director of the magazine ―Dionisio Ridruejo― because he had made the heroic decision, like Garcilaso, poet and soldier, to enlist with the Blue Division to fight with the Nazi army on the Russian front. .

Aznar recited those two verses, defended the historical continuity of the nation, freedom and finished off by proclaiming that "I am not going to retire, nor am I going to keep quiet."

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