Esteban González Pons (Valencia, 1964) is a politician, MEP, Vice President of the European Popular Party and Deputy Secretary for Institutional Policy of the PP since Alberto Núñez Feijóo became president of the PP, who in his last years in Brussels has written two novels, a romantic one about a youthful love, Ellas, and the one that is now published by El escaño de Satanás (Espasa), where politics is made in Congress coinciding with the discovery in the basement of the palace of some graves that will interfere in the political life of a country that is slipping down very dangerous paths. González Pons is also the author of a book of poems written on the mobile phone, named @-}-; his autobiography White Shirt; and a diary of the last leg of him on the afternoon Congress walk.
A politician writing about politics. Where does politics end and where does fiction begin?
The first thing I have to say is that I am a writer who does politics and therefore, like all writers, I write about my closest environment, so when I ask myself about reality and fiction, sometimes the answer is as far as the writer You can commit yourself as a politician.
How far can you?
It is difficult, because literature requires a commitment to reality that is always less condescending than the political commitment itself. The writer sees reality with more open eyes than the politician, the writer sees and does not understand, the politician sees and accepts. So my true consciousness as a politician stems from my ambition to be a writer.
He describes a policy that he seems to be disappointed in. Is it a feeling that you, as a politician, have?
At the end of the book, politics is saved, but I don't want to spoil it, and the book is dedicated to politics written with a capital P, but it is true that God and Satan coexist in politics. In politics I have found the worst part of the soul of the human being, and in politics I have discovered evil, which is difficult to find in any other facet of life, but at the same time, without politics there would be no public education, there would be no public health, there would be no public pensions, we would not have acceptable infrastructures, there would be no Justice. Without politics, the best of ourselves would not have been able to build it, so unfortunately, although politics is savage, politics is necessary.
If you hadn't been in Brussels, outside the leadership of the PP, would you have written the same book?
No. I have been able to write this novel, because I have seen Spanish politics from afar. Just as a battle cannot be narrated from the very center of the battle, one cannot tell what Spanish politics is like from the very center of Spanish politics. I have had to leave to see clearly and also to grow as a writer, and as a politician. The politics I describe in Satan's Seat is that of a country I love madly seen from afar.
You finished writing this novel just before Feijóo became president of the PP and you returned to Genoa. Do you now regret writing it?
No, if I regretted it, I wouldn't publish it. Both the publisher and I have doubted if it was the opportune moment to publish the novel. Finally we have chosen to do it, despite the criticism it may receive, and because it seems honest to me that my voters and my colleagues really know what I think. We politicians express ourselves in many ways and so do writers. For me, if I hadn't published my novel, it wouldn't be me. I'm actually more of a writer than a politician, although I sound more like a politician than a writer.
Do you think that the book can bring you problems in your party?
Not at all. We are not used to creative politicians, because in recent times politicians have dwarfed, like tweets, but the history of Spain is full of political writers, political painters, creative politicians. If I look back, I could cite up to ten great Spanish politicians who have also been novelists. We even have a Spanish politician who is a Nobel Prize for Literature and I think that in my party, as in the rest of the parties, they respect politicians who write fiction.
In the book, in fiction, its protagonist, who is from the PP, is opposed to agreeing with Escarmiento, that no one escapes that it is Vox. Are you just as reluctant in real politics?
One of the decisions I had to make at the beginning of the play was whether to call the parties by their real names or use fictitious names and I decided that if I were American I would talk about Republicans and Democrats, if I were British I would talk about Conservatives and Labour, and for Therefore, he had to talk about the PP and the PSOE. However, I have not done the same with Vox or with Podemos. Escarmiento is not Vox, it is a different party from Vox, in fact Vox appears separate from this crazy force that I have called Escarmiento. I think the novel is a caricature, a scarecrow of real Spain, but it has no translation in Spain.
There is a proliferation of books that start from a pandemic and a dystopia. Is there a risk that this situation that you describe in the book will happen?
There are two kinds of monsters in the book, those that come from the graves below Congress, and those that come from the political extremes. I want to think that in Spain it is more likely that a vampire will be resurrected under Congress than that there will be a government of the extreme right or of the extreme left.
You have been the PP's negotiator for an agreement from the General Council of the Judiciary that never came. Is the negotiation anything like the ones that take place in the book?
No, because in the book the negotiations appear as trading cards, and there is one in particular in which the author's point of view is located under the table and what the book tells is not what happens at the table, but how the feet of the negotiators move while the negotiation takes place. What Minister Bolaños and I tried to do had a vision that the negotiations that take place in this novel do not have. It is a pity that in the end they tried to deceive us.
From her previous novel, Ellas, people kept some sex novel. Now repeat. Do you understand that people don't see well that a politician talks about that?
No, I do not understand. In my previous 500-page novel, there was a page and a half in which, in their love story, the protagonists had sex. In this 500-page novel, there may be three in which the protagonists have some sexual contact. It seems to me that to pretend that politicians live in a world of people without sex is to believe that politicians are either corny or idiots. I think that society is mature enough not to be scandalized because a politician sees things as they are, people with sex and people who love each other, practicing it. It seems to me that this scandal is prudery.
As was said at the time of the uncovering, did the script require it?
When two people love each other, unless they are from a Spanish film from the 50s or 60s, the script normally requires them to get into the same bed together. Now, if the person who is scandalized has the same kind of love that we attribute to Aurora Bautista, then it is normal for her to be capable of thinking that her children are still coming from Paris.
Mariano Rajoy, who did not make him a minister, will present the book to him next week. Why not Feijoo?
Feijóo is invited, and the first book that came to me I gave it to him, because he is my friend. I have looked for writers who are also in politics for the presentation. My first novel was presented to me by Borja Semper and Maite Pagaza. This novel, in Valencia, is going to be presented to me by Marta Rivera de la Cruz and Carmen Amoraga, and Mariano Rajoy is a political writer. In fact, among all the politicians who write in Spain, Mariano Rajoy is Kent Follet, because none of the politicians who write in Spain have been able to sell 100,000 copies, and he has, as he has done with his book Politics for adults. I think Rajoy is another writer who has tried not to do badly in politics.
His book Is it Politics for Adults?
My book is literature for all ages, but my book is not a political book, it is a literary work.
