Ayuso labels the transfer of 'Guernica' as "naivety", 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, reaches the Senate this Tuesday. 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 possible" of the painting to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the first Basque government and the bombing of Guernica.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 "foolishness" and called it 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." 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 are they incapable of bringing a painting from Madrid to the Basque Country?"

A report from Reina Sofia

Díaz Ayuso takes refuge in a report made public by technicians from the Reina Sofía Museum stating that the canvas is in poor condition for a transfer. "It makes no sense to go back to the origin of things whenever it suits us, because then we would take all of Picasso's work to Malaga, or how does that work? That seems foolish to me," she said. The PP leadership has not directly commented on the case. The popular party's deputy secretary for finance, Juan Bravo, has, however, said that if the technicians say no, politicians "have little else to say." The PP spokesperson in the Basque Parliament, Laura Garrido, has asked the PNV to "stop playing the victim" and not confuse wishes with reality. She compares the Guernica to the David or the Mona Lisa.

Paradoxically, PP leaders do not mention the Sixena case, 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 doesn't believe it's a technical issue, because "conservation and transfer techniques have substantially improved". "It is incomprehensible that they tell us no due to the conditions in which the painting is", he affirmed, and that the argument that "without Guernica there is no museum" says "very little about the Reina Sofia collection".