It was autumn of 1962, I was 22 years old, I finished my law degree and began looking for those willing to create a sovereignly Andalusian political group, ready to fight against the dictatorship and to free Andalusia from its social and economic dependence.
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Luis Uruñuela, a university professor, was the first to say yes. He was followed by giants like Diego de los Santos, José Aumente, and Miguel Ángel Arredonda. The group, called Political Commitment of Andalusia, was born in the spring of 1965 and fifty years later, in 2015, out of dignity, it said goodbye, when the Andalusian people expressed their preferences for Spanish nationalist parties, against what was the first Andalusian party in history, present in the Parliaments of Spain, Andalusia, Europe, and even Catalonia.
Therefore, it is not true what I have seen published in many media, referring to the political baptism of Luis Uruñuela, at the hands of the PSA, in 1977, at the arrival of democracy, because it was 12 years earlier, in the middle of the dictatorship.
It is also not true, as has also been published in many other media, that the PSA was the “germ” of the Andalucista Party. PSA was simply the name adopted, upon the arrival of democracy, by Political Commitment, later called Socialist Alliance of Andalusia and finally Andalucista Party.
In the political jungle in which we find ourselves today, national and global, it is a pride for me to publish that it was possible to walk alongside Luis Uruñuela, always hand in hand, for 50 years, in the roughest political activism.
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Together we faced all kinds of opponents, still under dictatorship, founding the Democratic Board of Spain, in Paris, with the Communist Party, when not even socialism wanted to make a pact with it. Or when, already in democracy, we had to roll up our sleeves and make a pact with Suarez’s right wing, in Parliament, to wrest full autonomy for Andalusia, when neither the right nor the left wanted it. For both reasons, we were showered with slanders and calumnies, but we triumphed. We suffered harassment from far-right enemies during the dictatorship and harassment from socialist friends during democracy.
Luis Uruñuela was that kind of politician who is hard to find today: exemplary. And he was so because of the firmness of his commitment, his clarity, his coherence, his honesty, his anti-sectarianism. Oh! Foolish frontism of today.
Together we enjoyed successes that seemed impossible and together we accepted inexplicable defeats. Always rowing against the current, because Andalusianism today sanctified, even by those supposed to be its enemies, was then demonized even by those supposed to be its friends.
And as mayor of Seville, he was the best. The best, yes, because none of those who succeeded him knew how to embody the soul of Seville as he did. That art of living with firm convictions and customs, wrapped in dignity outwardly, empathy inwardly, and open arms to those who arrive and those in need.
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Thank you, Luis. Farewell.
