The Estudio 6 of Prado del Rey hosts this Wednesday one of the great events of the campaign for the general elections next Sunday and only two days after the end of the campaign to ask for the vote: the electoral debate with three of the candidates for the presidency of the government. Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), Santiago Abascal (VOX) and Yolanda Díaz (Sumar) will debate in what is now known as The Three-Way Debate, after the refusal of the PP candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to participate in the RTVE proposal of Discussion to 4.
It will be the last debate of these elections and, once again, at the forefront and as moderator will be the journalist Xabier Fortes, highly applauded and praised after his role in El Debate a 7 also held on RTVE last week, and already an expert in these battles.
After the face-to-face criticism of Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo broadcast by Atresmedia for the abrupt tone used by both candidates, as well as for the work of its moderators, Ana Pastor and Vicente Vallés, El Debate a 7 was highly applauded by the spectators thanks in part to the work of Fortes, who already warned days before that he was going to do everything in his power so that it was not a “tense” debate. “I have asked that they be replicated and interrupted, but that they do so within a moderation or order, because otherwise I would have to go in to redirect traffic,” she stated. So it was.
“Impeccable”, “great debate”, “exemplary”, “masterful”, “superb”… were some of the qualifiers addressed to the journalist on social networks after El Debate a 7. However, the praise is not to what that the Galician journalist is more used to. Fortes usually receives harsh ideological attacks from one side and the other. Something, to which he does not quite get used to, but as he pointed out some time ago in the magazine Mujerhoy, he cannot do anything either: “It would mortify me to make a bad program, but what they think of me in case I am red, blue or yellow is something It’s not in my hands to fix. I really can’t do anything about it.”
Tonight, Xabier Fortes is once again the only judge in a debate that, despite not having the presence of Feijóo, is expected to be tense. A task for which Xabier Fortes has predictably prepared himself in the same way and with the same objective as in last week’s debate: that noise does not take over moderation.
A task always falls on the figure of one journalist or more than one, as in the case of face-to-face, which the channels consider to have sufficient prestige and professionalism to carry out a task that is not easy at all, since in this way This figure depends on reproaches, interruptions, incorrect data, half truths, and even insults not becoming the protagonists of one of the most important electoral events in the campaign.
RTVE did not doubt that for these elections, as for the previous ones, the journalist who fit in perfectly was Xabier Fortes, who has already been in charge of said times innumerable. This 57-year-old Galician journalist is one of the most important journalistic figures of the public entity along with other faces such as Carlos Franganillo, Almudena Ariza or Silvia Intxaurrondo.
In recent years this journalist, who studied at the Complutense University of Madrid, has been in charge of TVE’s Los Desayunos and La noche en 24 horas. His professional career has always been linked to the Public Corporation. Despite having studied at the Madrid university, his first steps as a journalist began at RNE in Vigo, from where he made the leap into reporting, covering the hardest times of drug trafficking in Galicia. And from there, in the 90s to the RTVE newscasts in Galicia, first in the Pontevedra delegation and since 1998 in the Santiago de Compostela delegation, where he began working as an editor and presenter for regional newscasts.
Married to Maria del Carmen Iglesias Francisco, a teacher, with whom he has three children, he is the son of the writer and soldier Xosé Fortes Bouzán. His childhood was marked by his arrest.
The journalist has explained it many times, even when they have accused him of being the son of a military man and having studied in military schools. The reality is that his father set up in 1974, together with other officers, a clandestine organization -Democratic Military Union- to prevent the army from becoming an obstacle to the arrival of Democracy after Franco’s death. That group of officers, among whom was Fortes’s father, were arrested and sentenced, remaining in prison until the amnesty of King Juan Carlos after the death of the dictator.
It was not until 2010 when the Defense Minister, Carme Chacón, awarded 14 Crosses of Military and Aeronautical Merit to the former members of the UMD. “There, between Luis Otero and Fermín Ibarra, is my father, ‘Captain Fortes’. They are three of the nine officers arrested for founding the Democratic Military Union in the Francoist army. El Hacho military prison, Ceuta, 1975,” he published. in a tweet next to an image of his father in jail in 2018, the same image he has on his Twitter profile, after an RNE report on the Democratic Military Union.
And, perhaps, from that experience that marked his youth and his family, he learned not to be intimidated by anything. Xabier Fortes is probably one of the most active journalists on social networks. He always answers and always publishes his opinions despite being aware that there will be as many compliments as reproaches, and even insults. His detractors have accused him of “servility”, after an interview with Pedro Sánchez in November 2022, even of “being chaste” for publishing a photo of a plate with octopus and a glass of wine.
“I’ve been isolated in Madrid for 3 months without seeing my wife and my children. It’s Friday. After getting up at 4 in the morning, after finishing work, I eat an octopus tapa (€15) for his health and mine and We do a Skype as if we were together in Pontevedra. That’s why I’m chaste. Anyway…”, he replied then. Because it’s rare for Fortes to be silenced.
In fact, this very week, he has been one of the professionals, along with others such as Jordi Évole or Mamen mendizábal, who have applauded and praised the interview of his partner Silvia Intxaurrondo with Alberto Núñez Feijóo in which, in the words of Fortes, Intxaurrondo “dignified the profession.”
He has also shown that characteristic of his not to be intimidated with the public entity. Despite having been linked to RTVE throughout his career, when he has not been in line with the Public Corporation he has expressed it and has made the decisions he considered appropriate, such as when in August 2012, while Leopoldo González-Echenique was president of RTVE, he announced through his Twitter account that he would not continue as director and presenter of The night in 24 hours. He did it the same day that Ana Pastor was dismissed as the presenter of the Los desayunos program on TVE.
Later, in January 2013, he was appointed to form part of the Information Council of the public entity, from where he supported the protests of the workers, especially on the so-called Black Fridays, when the workers of the public entity protested to “enforce the law” that ” I was breaking the PP”.
Six years after leaving La noche en 24 horas and until 2020 he directed and presented Los desayunos de TVE, replacing Sergio Martín, who was precisely the one who replaced him at the helm of La noche en 24 horas in 2012. Despite his departure of the program three years ago, he returned to the front, replacing Marc Sala, curiously Silvia Intxaurrondo’s partner at the helm of La Hora de La 1.
Tonight, Xabier Fortes will once again be the moderator of a debate that is less strange after Feijó declined to participate. A refusal that Fortes himself criticized on his networks with a phrase that also cost him a good wave of invective: “Fear of debating fear of losing.” In fact, the journalist himself defended himself against countless criticisms by revealing “the call from a senior PP official” in 2019.
A lover of football and, in particular, of Pontevedra, whom he will support whenever he can on the field, he is a proud father who boasts on social networks that his youngest son plays precisely for Pontevedra.
But this Fortes is not the most famous. Raised with his four siblings, Belén, Alberto, Carlos and Susana, the latter is a number one seller. Susana Fortes, writer and columnist, was a finalist for the Planeta Award in 2003 with her novel El amante albanés. Belén writes poetry and owns the Guiverny and Alberto publishing house, although he is the least known of all the Fortes brothers, he is already on his ninth book. Carlos, according to the journalist in an interview with El Español, was a victim of Galician drug trafficking.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project