ANC Deutschland has denounced the Instituto Cervantes, a Spanish public organization funded with public money, for holding a political event in Frankfurt-am-Main.
The event next Friday, 16 November, will take the shape of a political debate with the title “Catalonia – (No) Problem for Europe?” and the main speakers will be Dr. Wilhelm Hofmeister, a specialist on Spain at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation; Dr. Birgit Aschmann, Professor of History at the Humboldt University (Berlin); and Sabine Riedel, Professor at the Economics and Politics Foundation. The event will be moderated by journalist Barbara Schwarzwälder.
The Assemblea denounces the fact that once again the Instituto Cervantes is forgetting its institutional and cultural nature and, instead of acting like a plural and public institution, is allowing itself to be used like a political tool for a specific agenda.
Assemblea therefore finds it incomprehensible that the Instituto Cervantes uses public resources towards clearly biased political events. This is not, however, the first time that the Instituto Cervantes has played politics. Some years ago, it censored the showing of Julio Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca, for its position against Spanish government policies. The Instituto also cancelled the presentation at Utrecht of Albert Sànchez Piñol’s book Victus. In addition, it recently cancelled the support to a conference put on by the University of London on “Iberian (In)tolerance: Minorities, Cultural Exchange and Social Exclusion in the Middle Age and the Beginning of Modern Age.”