From the socialist bench of the Madrid act of May 2, Juan Lobato and Reyes Maroto should have stood out. It was not so. In his place, Félix Bolaños emerged, slipped into the party. The Minister of the Presidency of the Government aka Pedro Sánchez was the unexpected protagonist of the festivity of the Community of Madrid. “The minister has to go up” still resonates among the crowd that gathered in Sol. Bolaños wanted to enter Ayuso’s joint with slippers and the response was to literally stop him.
Those were other times when Bolaños was paired with Iván Redondo. The last one, Oliver, the one who scored the goals, the one who carried the weight of the story and Benji, Bolaños, was limited to being in the background. After the fall of Redondo, Pedro Sánchez has seen in Bolaños the minister who can act as a valid figure on behalf of the PSOE leader wherever he is required and despite becoming the accidental protagonist of the week. Both teams -Ayuso’s and Bolaños’s- came out of the controversy claiming that their clients were right, of course.
However, from the point of view of communication, Ayuso was faster than Bolaños. The next day she sat down with Ángels Barceló to explain that the Government cannot have a master key with which to enter everywhere. Not at her house. “What you have to do is sow, sow and sow your point of view. That was what Ayuso tried to do in La Ser. As long as you let the other expose their arguments and strain their message, you are lost,” he affirms to LOC José Luis Martín Ovejero, expert in non-verbal communication and oratory.
The expert also points out that, based on the gestures that Bolaños had throughout the event, the minister was very nervous. “He looked tense. When he entered the Puerta del Sol he was already very nervous. We can see it by the calming gestures he had. He rubbed his hands and rearranged his shirt cuffs on several occasions.”
Bolaños’s nervousness contrasted with the poise of Margarita Robles, who knew she was well invited and even made physical contact with Ayuso. In fact, it was Iván Redondo himself who made Margarita ugly for having left her Benji alone. “Robles should not have gone on stage leaving Félix behind. That is inadmissible,” he claimed in Espejo Público.
Bolaños did not manage to get on the rostrum but they have dedicated a few to him in the media. The profile of a discreet and methodical man of him has changed to give way to headlines of anger and confrontation. They don’t think so in his town, Villafranca de los Caballeros, a town located in Toledo but bordering Ciudad Real. “He comes here whenever he can. He is a normal guy, very good people. He does not forget his roots,” explains Julián Bolaños, mayor [and relative, given his last name] of the municipality to LOC.
Bolaños was born in Madrid but his father is from Villafranca de los Caballeros and his mother from another Toledo town, Fuensalida. They met in the 1960s while emigrating to Germany and returned to settle in Madrid and open a bird shop in Móstoles. They had an only son, Félix, who studied Law at the Complutense and even got a lawyer’s position at the Bank of Spain after working at the Uría y Menéndez law firm. “With the money he earned there, he did not need to get into politics and yet he has done it. He joined the PSOE in La Latina and from that moment on he combined his militancy with his work. For us it is a pride to have a minister of the people, She doesn’t need a grandmother with me. She has put us on the map and also our products. She brought saffron to the Pope.” Pedro Sánchez’s call was decisive, once again, for Bolaños to leave his comfortable position at the Bank of Spain to “get into trouble.”
Both Bolaños’s parents and in-laws live in Villafranca, where his wife, Fátima, became deputy mayor of the town. She was not her most important position since she was appointed advisor to the Cabinet of the Minister of Education with Isabel Celaá. The couple have a son in common with whom they try to spend as much time as possible and who they take with them to town, especially in summer, so that he can be with his grandparents.
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