Mellowness is an essential factor in Yolanda Díaz's way of communicating. A smiling, sing-song tone of voice that adds feeling to the message. This is an unusual characteristic in the political arena, where she governs an objectively neutral tone, little given to the expressiveness that so often means entering devilish gardens. Far from the affectation that the term includes, in Díaz, that closeness and sweetness is facilitated by her galeguidade, which endows words with feeling through diminutives: those biquiños so attached to her speech.
Last summer I was in Vigo for a few days thanks to the hospitality of my friend and writer Inma López Silva. On my first solitary walk, I was shocked when the baker greeted me with an effervescent "Hello, sweetie!" I wanted to laugh at him despite my stupor, but immediately I noticed as much normality as routine in the greeting. As if some sugar had stuck to the palate, without cloying. Rather, it had to do with a joyful sadness, a kind of obligation to soften the deal, just like that “Boas noites, sentidinho”, with which Xabier Fortes ends the news.
Those days, Inma and I attended, together with her partner, Francisco Castro, editor of Galaxia, a tribute to Domingo Villar in Moaña, and the mayoress spoke as if the sun dazzled her, narrowing her eyes, sparkling and almost emotional. Speak as Yolanda Díaz commented to my friends, squinting the words to spin a musicality that crosses any barrier of understanding.
That smiling and close timbre, capable of knocking down the fourth wall – politics has a lot of theater – also has detractors. She is accused of being “cheesy” and “trickster” by the same people who gave her the clever nickname “La Fashionaria”. They can't stand that Díaz embodies a less imposted institutionality, although dressed in a good pancake. Or was it not her compatriot, Adolfo Domínguez, who restored her dignity to the wrinkle?
A little over a century ago, in Madrid it was said that "Galicia only gives water carriers or ministers". The recount throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th is lengthy; Eduardo Dato and Salvador de Madariaga from A Coruña, José Canalejas from Ferrol or José Calvo Sotelo from Tue stand out. During the Second Republic, Santiago Casares Quiroga, from A Coruña of Compostela descent, presided over the Council of Ministers.
And, after the four decades of dictatorship of the bad leader, democracy recovered the habit of having "the essential Galician ministers", as was said between jokes and envy during the Franco regime. Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Elena Salgado, José Manuel Romay Becaría, César Antonio Molina, Ana Pastor, Francisco Caamaño, Pepe Blanco or Nadia Calviño are some of them.
Without forgetting the day when a Santiago epitome of the galeguidade, conservative, serious and hard-working, often indecipherable, withdrawn and somewhat coitadiño, Mariano Rajoy, achieved what the patriarch Fraga never achieved. Feijoo now repeats his script, without even stumbles with the typicality.
While Yolanda Díaz is presented as the new girlfriend of Spain, a white mark on the left. And unlike so many countrymen, she softens the Galician essence and makes it ostentatious instead of disguising it. Although her sweetness does not renounce deeply rooted values such as pragmatism, chipping away at stone and even the homesickness of a time when politics and people did not turn their backs on each other.
