The terrace has privileged views. In front, a clean print of the Grajela hill. To the left, a few meters away, the bell tower of the church of San Juan Bautista. On the right, the typical small village houses covered with tiles. Only trills are heard, many trills. “I’m getting into politics because this paradise is threatened by a fucking macrofarm”, is the first thing our host says, looking at the horizon, when we access his roof.
Ángel Corpa is the founder of Jarcha, the musical group that launched what is considered the anthem of the Transition: Libertad sin ira. He is now, at the age of 70, in another transition, a personal one that has led him from music to embark on politics as head of the Cuenca Ahora list for the autonomous regions of Castilla-La Mancha. And he has just returned to his town -Barajas de Melo (Cuenca)- after spending a few days in Seville recording another anthem, the one that will represent all the parties that compete at 28M for the so-called España Vaciada, as is the case of the brand that he represents. “How long will the silence last / of this Spain, which is dying / Empty, dry and without a future / Bled dry by adversity”, begins the song by the author of the music and lyrics.
After the success of Teruel Existe -which won a seat in the Congress of Deputies in the general elections of 2019-, and Soria Ya! -three seats in the Cortes of Castilla y León in the autonomous ones of 2022-, rural Spain has armed itself politically in the face of 28-M. España Vaciada, Aragón Existe, Soria ¡YA!, Teruel Existe, Cuenca Ahora and Jaén Derece -organized under the umbrella of the Federation of Parties of España Vaciada- and some other brands outside this group -such as Por Huelva- are presented at the autonomous ones in four of the 12 communities in which they are held: Aragón, Asturias, La Rioja and Castilla-La Mancha. And to the municipal ones in dozens of towns in at least 15 provinces, waiting for other candidacies to join: Asturias, La Rioja, Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Salamanca, León, Toledo, Zaragoza, Huesca, Toledo, Teruel, Cuenca , Jaen and Huelva. Will they be decisive when constituting majorities? Will they get any major town hall? Will they have the key in communities where the polls predict a very tight result, such as that of our protagonist, Castilla-La Mancha, with the PP and PSOE two or three points behind? The parties of Empty Spain are the great unknown of 28M.
Before entering the political arena, we reviewed his biography with Ángel Corpa. He was born in 1952 in Barajas de Melo, in a house around the corner. His father, secretary of the local administration, was first transferred to Cuenca, when he was 9 or 10 years old, and later to Palencia. Corpa soon started in the theater, to the anger of the head of the family, who considered artistic trades a thing for “low life people.” Around the year 1970, his theater group managed to circumvent censorship and obtained the níhil óbstat – “there is no objection” – to premiere Smile, Mr. Dictator, by the historic reporter Vicente Romero, at the headquarters of the newspaper Pueblo. The father put him between a rock and a hard place: “If you go to Madrid to do that work, don’t step foot in this house anymore.”
Corpa did not step foot in the family home in Palencia. He settled in Huelva as an educator in a minor school. There he founded in 1972, at the age of 20, Jarcha. Half a century, 20 CDs, 3,800 concerts, a gold record and hundreds of dubbings later -he has voiced everything from the character of Frieza in Dragon Ball to actors in Turkish soap operas-, in 2008 he decided to return to the town where he was born to take care of his mother. After she died, he stayed, trapped by the luxuries that Barajas de Melo offered him: “Time, silence and a wonderful landscape that gives me life.”
This peace was disturbed by the announcement in 2018 that a macro-farm was intended to be installed in the town. «I think it is 6,200 breeding fences, a shitty factory, a brutal ecological bomb. It takes between 800 and 1,000 hectares to expand the shit they produce, so it doesn’t matter which way the wind blows because you eat it all the time. And the people who are going to be employed are not going to settle in the town. Here they would leave the shit to us and the wealth would go to Tarancón [20 kilometers away] or to Madrid », she says.
Corpa and a few friends, newcomers to Barajas de Melo like him -a historian, a girl who works in Justice, Quique, who is an ecologist and has developed a fungus “that eats cigarette butts”…- created an association of neighbors against the macrofarm and denounced the project, now paralyzed.
He says that he found out by chance about the celebration in the Town Hall of the plenary session in which the license for the macro-granja was voted – “here there is a policy of great secrecy” -. He was, he says, the only resident of the town who attended the plenary session. «To my surprise all the councilors [four from the PSOE, three from the PP] raised their hands. A left-wing party and a right-wing party that normally defend opposing interests by voting unanimously…».
Corpa touches one of the points used by the parties of emptied Spain to justify the need for its existence. They want to capitalize on the discontent with the big parties, whom they accuse of not carrying out a policy of closeness, of forgetting the interests of their neighbors to follow the instructions of the national leaderships. «Cuenca is now a transversal party. There are sensibilities on the left and on the right, but I think we have a lot in common. We have not lost our independence and the decisions we make are sovereign because they are not subject to foreign orders, as is the case of the PSOE and the PP, who receive guidelines from Toledo, Madrid or wherever”, says Corpa.
We asked Sigma Dos where the presumed voters of Empty Spain lean ideologically, if their participation in 28M harms the left or the right more. “These parties propose a new axis that skips over, or overlaps, the left-right axis, such as the rural-urban axis,” answers José Luis Rojo, deputy director of research for the survey company. «However, their voters come more from urban environments in the provinces, where the rural has great weight, than from the rural area itself, where traditional brands such as PP or PSOE continue to be the majority. If, however, we maintain the ideological axis, the most plausible hypothesis is that his electorate is more made up of progressive voters, but this may vary depending on the area and the candidacy. In Soria and Teruel they have removed votes from the left, which have come especially from the capitals, and it seems that in Huesca they can remove the center right, according to the polls, “he adds.
Ángel Corpa came out very upset from that plenary session in which the macrogranja was approved. The association that they had set up against the project then decided to create a group of voters to run for municipal elections with the intention of fighting against it from within. They failed. “We needed 15 people registered in the town to go to the City Hall to give their ID and we only found eight,” he says. “There is a lot of fear here. There are mayors with many legislatures that have become caciques », he says to explain the reason for the little success.
Then they learned of the existence of Cuenca Ahora and two meetings with them later, not only did they have a municipal candidacy, but the party, aware of the pull that the founder of Jarcha could have, asked Ángel Corpa to be its candidate for the regional elections for Basin. He said yes.
The province of Cuenca has 152,000 voters and five seats in the regional parliament, which has 33. It is estimated that Corpa will need between 16,000 and 20,000 votes to get a seat as a regional deputy and aspire to act as arbitrator between García Page (PSOE) and Paco Núñez (PP).
“They have told me that it is possible,” says Corpa. “People are tired of the old politics and that’s where we can get a share of power that allows us to pull the car a little to Cuenca.”
They’re not so optimistic about their chances in Sigma Two. This is how José Luis Rojo values ??the possibilities of the matches of the Empty Spain. «We have the precedent of the elections in Castilla y León, where the expectation was wide and, however, the phenomenon was limited almost exclusively to Soria ¡Ya!, which already existed before the concept of Empty Spain, but decided to integrate into it. . In La Rioja they present themselves as Partido Riojano-España Vaciada and could repeat or slightly improve the result of Partido Riojano, but it does not seem that they will be decisive in the formation of a possible government. In Aragón they are presented as Aragón Existe and could be decisive depending on their results, especially in Huesca and Teruel, due to the drag effect of Teruel Existe at a national level, and not so much because of the umbrella offered by España Vaciada. Beyond this, it seems almost impossible that they have a run in other territories such as Extremadura or Castilla la Mancha, where they have not even been clearly articulated.
Ángel Corpa has a list with the main points of his program, most of them local demands -not to macro-farms or waste dumps, the conservation of the Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia railway, in the process of being closed, the Cuenca-Teruel and Cuenca highways -Albacete, the creation of health centers nearby…- and a great objective in which all the parties of Empty Spain agree: the increase in investment in the rural world to fight against depopulation.
Barajas de Melo today has 926 residents -there were 2,400 when Corpa was born- and a density of 6.67 inhabitants per square kilometer. Cuenca -11.67 inhabitants per square kilometer- is, together with Teruel and Soria, below the 12 inhabitants that, Corpa explains, marks the limit of super-depopulation. “We are turning this town around like a sock with 40 new families,” he would say later during a walk along the Calvache River, which rises and ends in the town’s municipal area. “A very small river but with two balls, because it never dries up,” he says.
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