18/04/2013

_ With the president of the country, Otto Pérez Molina, and the former president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores

José María Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain and president of FAES Foundation, took part in the launch in Guatemala city of the Escuela de Gobierno, an academic project for public management and political leadership promoted by Guatemalan personalities from the civil, business and administrative spheres. The president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and the former president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores, also participated in the event.

In his address, Aznar stated that “political training is not just teaching ways or means of public management, ideas and history. It also involves teaching how to continue on, how to overcome difficulties. It’s teaching that ideas must be defended and policies must be enforced, and that’s not always simple”. And he added that “leadership must be trained, but this must not be mistaken for a certain aesthetics or a certain jargon. Leadership is the momentum arising from the knowledge that the life of many depends on your own success”.

Aznar also referred to the bond between freedom and progress, “the core of any feasible and fair political project”, and therefore asserted the strengthening of institutions and civil society, respect for the law, legal certainty and the creation of a true society of opportunities. “And also social mobility, the consolidation and expansion of the middle class. The establishment of serious policies in a thriving society resulting in freely unleashing its full growth potential”, he said.

LOOKING AFTER DEMOCRACY
Aznar, recalling that on September FAES had celebrated in Guatemala the first edition of its Campus Central America & the Caribbean, remarked that “all that is more alive today than ever before in Latin America, but the moment must be seized in its full potential so that positive things are made irreversible”.

“Democracy must be looked after, it must be taught and strengthened. Welfare must be enabled, like progress and real opportunities for all”, Aznar said, adding that “none of this can be kept without it being taught and learnt. Without the habit of becoming responsible for its protection and development”. “That’s the only way of doing it so that societies don’t have to start from scratch with each generation”.

Aznar considered that “the best democracies of the world are those that combine in a natural way a passionate experience of common symbols and institutions with and equally passionate defence of those policies and stances that one considers best”. “Liberal democracy does not exist to eliminate political conflict, but to do so in a peaceful and useful manner for the nation”, he declared.