Some controversial statements by the director of the Cervantes Institute, the poet Luis García Montero, this Thursday at an informative breakfast, against the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), Santiago Muñoz Machado, have brought to light what was an open secret, the bad relationship between the two. And, incidentally, they raise how this can affect the necessary collaboration between the two main institutions that protect the Spanish language, which has more than 500 million native speakers in the world. Cervantes was created in 1991, as other countries had done, to promote the teaching of Spanish and spread Spanish culture abroad. It also does so with the co-official languages in the territories where it coexists with Spanish: Catalan, Galician, Basque. The RAE is a three-centennial institution, founded in 1713, and is responsible for the proper use of the Spanish language and for maintaining unity within its diversity. Here we point out some keys to understand what happened and why.
What García Montero said
Luis García Montero (Granada, 66 years old), professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, has directed the Cervantes since 2018, when he was appointed by the Government of Pedro Sánchez. He is also a columnist for EL PAÍS. At the New Economy Forum in Madrid, he said when asked about his relationship with the director of the RAE that this institution “is in the hands of a professor of Administrative Law who is an expert in running business from his (law) office for multimillion-dollar companies. That, personally, creates distances.” It was a big leap in the known bad relationship between the two, something that had not been revealed until now in such an explicit and sour way. Muñoz Machado’s private occupation and economic level have been on García Montero’s lips when he referred to the relationship between the two.
The harsh response of the RAE
The language academy, like every Thursday, celebrated its plenary session, with some of its members connected from Peru, where they have traveled to the tenth International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), which will take place from the 14th to the 17th of this month in Arequipa (Peru). The plenary session agreed “unanimously to express its absolute rejection of Mr. García Montero’s incomprehensible statements, completely unfortunate and inopportune,” the statement said. “The attack on its director and president offends the RAE and the Association of Language Academies (the 23 in the world). Almost nothing with four days remaining of an event that brings together nearly 300 people including academics, writers, philologists… and the King, who will give his inaugural speech on Wednesday, October 15.
The first discrepancies
Santiago Muñoz Machado (Pozoblanco, Córdoba, 76 years old) is a jurist, professor of Administrative Law and has a law firm, as García Montero recalled. He arrived at his position in December 2018, elected by the RAE plenary session, which saw in him a more technical and business profile so that the institution could deal with its significant economic difficulties, today solved, to a large extent, by an economic injection from the State. He renewed the position in 2022 and, if he stands for another re-election, it would be in 2026. A few months after his election, he and García Montero already had their first disagreements at the CILE held in Córdoba (Argentina), in 2019, say those who attended him. These conferences are held every three years in a Spanish-speaking country to test the state of the Spanish language and raise its challenges.
Clashes in Cádiz
In 2023, the ninth congress of the Spanish language was held. It was in Cádiz and had to be organized in three months because the one planned in Arequipa had been canceled due to the political situation in the country. On the last day of the congress, Muñoz Machado and García Montero gathered the journalists separately to tell them their conclusions and their disagreements. The person in charge of the RAE recognized “moments of tension” that had been “resolved” during the development of the congress. “These frictions,” he added, had had more to do “with certain ways of being and with personalities, than with institutions.” It must be taken into account that the Cervantes depends on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain, directed by José Manuel Albares, and that in the academic program of the language congresses, with its presentations and dozens of round tables and debates, the weight is carried by the RAE. Meanwhile, García Montero acknowledged that in the face of so many academic events “a more measured offer would be convenient.”
Other differences
In addition to the lack of personal harmony between the director of the RAE and García Montero, who has a communist ideology, which places him far from Muñoz Machado, there are differences in certain matters of social interest. For example, inclusive language, against which the RAE has repeatedly expressed itself, while the head of Cervantes is more permissive, without accepting that it is said we. In García Montero’s words on Thursday there were other darts against the RAE. “We, by the definition of the institute, feel linked to the diversity of the languages of the State, and we do not understand the closedness of what it means to recognize wealth,” he said when asked about Cervantes’ relationship with the RAE. And more: “No one should tell others how to speak, but rather maintain unity while respecting each person.” In the afternoon, the RAE responded in its statement: “The qualitative differences between the highly meritorious work of the RAE with any other institution that deals with Spanish and its culture in the world are evident.”
And now what?
In four days, García Montero and Muñoz Machado, and their respective teams, will meet in Arequipa. Both will coincide in several events, such as those in tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa, from Arequipa; also in the inaugural session with the King and in some round tables. It will be necessary to see if they iron out differences, if the cold war continues or if the glass overflows again.