Ayuso calls the transfer of 'Guernica' a "bestiality", a matter that today reaches the Senate

BarcelonaThe possible transfer of the Guernica to the Basque Country, which the Basque government has formally requested from Madrid, arrives this Tuesday in the Senate. The PNV will once again ask the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, "why he refuses to study the necessary conditions to make a temporary loan" of the painting to the Guggenheim in Bilbao possible, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the first Basque government and the bombing of Gernika.

The possible transfer has been straining relations between the lehendakari, Imanol Pradales, and the Sánchez government for weeks, and has already provoked predictable criticism from the PP. Now, the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has defined it as a "bestiality" and said it is an "absurd controversy that nationalism always promotes". Ayuso says that Basques can go to Madrid to see the Guernica

, at the Reina Sofía Museum, where it is available to all citizens because "it is the heritage of all Spaniards". "What cannot be done is to divide it among 17 states, nations, and in this way continue to fuel the feeling of grievance – he stated – to justify or to distort the history of everything".

The lehendakari, Imanol Pradales, has asked for "political courage" from the central government: "Did they take Franco out of his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen and they are not capable of taking a painting from Madrid to the Basque Country?" "The ball is in their court, let them respond," he said at the Aberri Eguna celebration. For the PNB, it is a "reparation to the Basque people, to democratic memory".

A report from the Reina Sofía

Díaz Ayuso is using a report made public by technicians from the Reina Sofía Museum as a shield, which states that the canvas is in poor condition for a transfer. "It makes no sense to go to the origin of things according to our convenience, because then we would take all of Picasso's work to Malaga, or how does it work? I think this is an outrage," he said. The PP leadership has not directly commented on the case. However, the popular party's deputy secretary for Finance, Juan Bravo, has stated that if the technicians say no, politicians "have little more to say." The PP spokesperson in the Basque Parliament, Laura Garrido, has asked the PNB to "stop playing the victim" and not confuse desires with reality. He compares the Guernica with the David or the Mona Lisa.

Paradoxically, PP leaders do not mention the case of Sijena, for which a judge has decreed that 12th-century paintings must be removed from a national museum to be transferred to an isolated monastery in Aragon, against all technical reports.

The lehendakari says he does not believe it is a technical issue, because "conservation and transfer techniques have substantially improved". "It is incomprehensible that they tell us no because of the conditions in which the painting is", he stated, and that the argument that "without Guernica there is no museum" says "very little about the Reina Sofía collection".