The return of Juan Carlos Girauta to politics and what he can contribute to Vox

@ElentirENG ES 3·22·2024 · 7:07 0

Yesterday several media outlets announced that Vox has signed Juan Carlos Girauta as an independent for the European elections.

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The years of 'The liberal emergence'

Girauta is a very valuable intellectual. He was one of the most influential voices in the years of civic rebellion against Zapatero's socialist government, a time in which he wrote his book "La eclosion liberal" (The liberal emergence), published in 2006, 18 years ago. years, when we still did not imagine how far the Spanish left would be able to go in its fanaticism and how far the Popular Party would go with its lukewarmness.

I have a copy signed by him on February 23, 2007, at a conference he gave in Vigo (I published the video here). On page 73 you could read a preview of what would end up happening with the center-right in Spain, when Girauta, speaking about the year 2000 and the beginning of the second term of José María Aznar, stated "the realization that the representatives of liberal-conservative Spain were not going to make the slightest effort to prepare, much less to wage, the decisive battle of ideas." That ideological desertion, which began with Aznar, was completed with Rajoy, Casado and Feijóo. Today the PP is just another social democratic party, which hardly differentiates itself from the left in its approaches.

His time in Cs and his abandonment of politics

Years after that, Girauta became part of the Ciudadanos (Cs) party, which initially seemed to be an attempt to present a liberal alternative to separatism in Catalonia, but which finally ended up joining the social democracy as the PP had done. After the departure of Albert Rivera, in December 2019 Girauta left politics, devoting himself since then to writing opinion articles, first in Abc and now in El Debate. Two years ago he made his current ideological coordinates clear: " I direct my advice to the liberal-conservative world."

His growing affinity for Vox

That life beyond politics has shown a Girauta increasingly more sympathetic to Vox. I am one of those who think that Girauta did not fit in with Cs and that his time in that party harmed him, but even at that time, he maintained his friendship with Santiago Abascal, president of Vox. In fact, before Girauta left politics, in October 2019 Abascal was on "El Hormiguero" on Antena 3 and there they asked him: "Which politician from another party would sign for Vox? Only because of his talent, not because of his ideology." The president of Vox replied: "to Juan Carlos Girauta." Raúl Gallart published the video yesterday:

Hoy es un buen día para recordar esta respuesta de @Santi_ABASCAL

Lo mejor SIEMPRE está por llegar.
¡¡SEGUIMOS!!💪🇪🇸 #GIRAUTA pic.twitter.com/gdU89Melv6

— Raúl Gallart (GIRAUTERS) 📲 (@RaulGallart80) March 21, 2024

In recent years, especially in his articles in El Debate, we have seen Girauta recover the vitality of his years before politics, enjoying that advantageous situation of those who are free of ties and can express their opinion no holds barred. Girauta ended up acknowledging: "I will never vote for the PP again in my life. Logically, I have to vote for Vox. I am more liberal than the average Vox voter, so what? I, for example, answer a question: who stands up to the nationalists? And I see a party. Well, that's the one I vote for."

Girauta's contribution to Vox

I think that the signing of Girauta is good news for Vox, since he brings to this party the lifeblood of a liberal-conservative veteran who is seasoned by many years of defending Spain and of Freedom out in the open. Furthermore, Girauta champions a liberal discourse that has much to contribute to Vox, as the example of Milei in Argentina has shown: the message of the necessary limitation of political power, of the defense of freedom against socialism and the commitment to the free market and social initiative against unbridled statism.

A good communicator to confront the left and separatism

On the other hand, Girauta is a person who has spent decades denouncing the alliance of socialism with separatism, who knows to what extent both are harmful to our society because he has suffered them in his homeland, Catalonia., to make known what is happening and also to offer the Spanish people the necessary argumentative tools to combat that threat. With Vox, Girauta now has a channel so that his voice can be heard by even more people.

His support for Israel in the face of left-wing anti-Semitism

Finally, people like Girauta are very necessary now in the West, at a time when the propaganda of Putinism and anti-Semitism tries to present Putin's Russia as the great alternative against Wokism and Israel as the bad guy in the Middle East. Girauta is a great defender of Israel, something that has a lot of merit in Spain, a country in which the left is mostly anti-Semitic and is imposing an aberrant discourse of demonization of the Jewish State, a country that is defending Western civilization against the terrorist barbarity of the Islamists of Hamas.

His prediction of the Russian threat looming over Europe

On the other hand, Girauta was one of the first to understand what Europe was at stake in Ukraine. Two months before the Russian invasion, in December 2021, he wrote in an article in Abc:

"The Crimean crisis caught me in the European Parliament, which allowed me to learn about the thousand beautiful forms that 'the politics of values' can take in the hands of a pompous body with no room for decision. In front , the old empire was stretching. It kept intact a vision of the world that the EU, a bubble of well-being and lack of realism, had forgotten. With one exception: the members that were fresh from their submission to the USSR. Specifically, Poland , whose ironclad adherence to the principle of sovereignty seems an anachronism to its partners, or, more than to them, to its media.

If in a couple of months there is war in Ukraine, a country that before the events of 2014 saw its accession to the EU as possible and close, the contrast between our values policy and Russian foreign policy and defense, which continue to draw on traditional geopolitics. The empire has awakened with its nineteenth-century (and even earlier) vision unchanged. Tsarism by another name, but tsarism nonetheless, with its expansionism, with its determined challenge to any 'status quo' in which the giant feels cramped, with its love for buffer states. And for the buffer state, Ukraine."

In that article, Girauta warned against "the defensive dwarfism of the EU and the return to isolationism of the US.", words that turned out to be prophetic. Vox already showed its support for Ukraine a month before the invasion and has continued to support the invaded country afterwards, and it has done so by claiming something that many European politicians had forgotten: national sovereignty and patriotism, which is what has moved so many Ukrainians to stay in their country and even return to it to defend it. Hopefully Vox will achieve the necessary votes in the next European elections for Girauta to be in Brussels.

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Image: El Debate.