FAES Foundation launched Canalejas. Un liberal reformista, the fourth volume of the series Biografías Políticas, published by its imprint Gota a Gota. The book was launched in the Centre for Political and Constitution Studies. Ricardo Martín de la Guardia, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Valladolid; Benigno Pendás, director of the Centre; and Miguel Ángel Quintanilla, FAES Director of the Publishing Department, also took part in the event.

FAES Foundation, through its imprint Gota a Gota, publishes the fourth volume of its series Biografías Políticas, dedicated to José Canalejas, four times minister and president of the Congress of Deputies. The new book, Canalejas. Un liberal reformista, written by Salvador Forner, unfolds the career of one of the greatest political figures of the early 20th century.

Last 19th of March the National Assembly of Venezuela, dominated by the pro-government United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV,) requested the Public Prosecutor’s Office to initiate an investigation on the allegedly subversive activities of María Corina Machado, a Member of Parliament representing the state of Miranda. The pro-Chávez Speaker of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, accused Machado of being both “an instigator and a culprit” of the violent deaths occurred in Venezuela since the 12th of February, when the protests against Nicolás Maduro’s regime began.

Anyone who has lived the Spanish Transition will remember with nostalgia a time when difficulties, which were many, were overcame with the eagerness of doing things well. Unlike previous times, past mistakes, which hade made Spanish democracy very brief, were known and borne in mind, and the majority willed not to repeat them. Like Suárez said, the predominant aim was to make coexistence long-lasting and not just a parenthesis.

When on July 3, 1976, King Juan Carlos I chose Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister of Spain amongst the three candidates submitted by the Privy Council, few people knew his name. 

November 9, 2004 was the fifteenth anniversary of the ?fall? of the Berlin Wall. To commemorate the event, the FAES Foundation organized a series of lectures called ?The Freedom Revolution?, in which twelve figures from the political and intellectual world in the East and West took part. The series was coordinated by Ana Palacio, a member of the Spanish Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, and it ran from November 2004 to May 2005.One of the main theses of the ?Freedom Revolution? is that the Berlin Wall did not collapse of its own accord. The Wall was pulled down by the determination of people who risked their lives in order to regain their freedom. If the Wall fell it was also because of the steadfastness of a generation of politicians who were determined to stop the advance of totalitarian tyranny despite of the incomprehension of a large proportion of intellectuals in the West. These efforts helped to bring freedom and peace to the other side of the Iron Curtain.Some of the eye witnesses of that time, many of whom played key roles in the process, took part in the lecture series and explained their vision of events and their response. Helmut Kohl, Bronislaw Geremek, Giovanni Sartori, Nicolas Baverez, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Sorman, André Glucksmann, Richard Perle, Joseph Weiler and Christopher DeMuth took us through what happened in the Freedom Revolution. Their words, their memories and their teachings, given in the Great Hall of San Pablo-CEU University, are gathered together in this volume, which also includes the introductions made by José María Aznar, AnaPalacio and José María Lassalle.The FAES Foundation would like to give special thanks to Noah Clarke, Carmelo López-Arias, Elena Segura, Jessica Zorogastua and Miguel Ángel Quintanilla Navarro for their work in putting together this publication.We would also like to thank the Rector of San Pablo-CEU University, José Alberto Parejo Gámir, for the magnificent facilities offered by the university, which made this lecture series possible.

Europe is in the throes of two simultaneous crises: on the one hand, it is suffering from a political crisis, a crisis of leadership, one that has led to constitutional failure; on the other, it is suffering from a loss of identity, a phenomenon that results in cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, Speaker of the Italian Senate and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pisa, delivered a conference entitled “Strength of Identity” during the course of the FAES Campus 2005, a paper which the FAES Foundation is now publishing. Also known as the co-author of the book Senza Radici (“Without Roots”) alongside Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Professor Pera urges European culture to proudly recall and reaffirm its origins and its universal democratic principles: freedom, equality and tolerance. In this respect, Europe must recognise the intrinsic value of a civilisation, Western civilisation, that has given the world so many universal ideas. “Europe must be aware of the moral superiority of a series of values that have prevailed over centuries and that have produced beneficial results wherever they have become established”.