Green European Journal: Your flagship initiative as Spain’s minister of culture has been the Cultural Rights Plan. What’s the vision behind it? And what exactly are cultural rights?

Ernest Urtasun: With this plan, we are trying to change the approach to public policies on culture. For many years, cultural policies have been interpreted as merely a means to support cultural consumption, such as by making culture more affordable. This is a bit strange, considering that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights already recognised culture as a fundamental right in 1945. But member states never fully aligned their cultural policies with international law. Now we want to do precisely that: consider culture a fundamental right.

This means that culture needs to be accessible and affordable, but it is not limited to that. It also means that as a citizen, you have a right to participate in the cultural life of your community and to have the means for artistic creation. To achieve these general goals, the plan envisions hundreds of concrete actions, including removing barriers to cultural participation, promoting cultural education, ensuring gender equality, protecting multilingualism, and advancing digital governance.

Spain is one of the first countries in Europe to take such actions, but not in the world. Brazil, for instance, has been working with a cultural rights perspective for many years.

Many of the issues the plan aims to address – economic precarity, discrimination, unequal access – reflect broader inequalities and divisions within society. Is culture the right tool to mend these divisions?

Absolutely. For citizens to be able to enjoy their cultural rights, we need to address the socio-economic inequalities that prevent them from participating in cultural life. There are several barriers that need to be removed. For example, Spain, like other European countries, has introduced a 400-euro grant for young people to spend on cultural products and activities such as books or theatre tickets. However, only 70 per cent of 18-year-olds make use of it, while the remaining 30 per cent don’t – either because they don’t know about it, or because they don’t have the opportunities to use it. This is a form of social discrimination. With the Cultural Rights Plan, we are working with what we call third-sector associations to reach these people and make them aware of the options they have.

Geography adds another level of discrimination. If you live far away from the big Spanish cities, you don’t always have access to cultural services such as public libraries, museums, or theatres. This prevents you from enjoying your cultural rights.

There’s also a huge gender gap in culture, which reflects the reality of Spanish society. Women in Spain have more difficulties in fully enjoying their cultural rights than men. For instance, if you are a female actor, there are very high chances that you have been sexually harassed.

All these inequalities – social, territorial, gender, and more – create unequal access to culture, which in turn reinforces disparities. By making culture a fundamental right and accessible to everyone, we also ­fight inequalities in general. S

By making culture a fundamental right and accessible to everyone, we also fight inequalities in general.

Some of the inequities you mentioned have contributed to fuelling the extreme right in Spain. How has the rise of the far-right party Vox, particularly at the regional level, affected culture?

The far right in Spain considers culture a threat. When they participated in regional governments in recent years, they often negotiated with the conservatives to get the cultural portfolio for themselves. Once they had control over cultural policies, they went on to massively cut subsidies for progressive cultural initiatives – promoting censorship by cancelling festivals, plays, performances, and other cultural events. This shows that the far right sees very clearly that culture is a powerful tool for critical thinking and therefore needs to be weakened or cancelled. As soon as we arrived at the ministry, we addressed this by creating a special unit to ­fight censorship in the regions.

Isn’t there more than just censorship in the far right’s vision of culture? In other European countries, they have put forward their own model, not defunding but monopolising cultural institutions and public media.

I don’t think that has been the case in Spain so far. Vox hasn’t taken advantage of the regional cultural portfolios to create anything particularly benefi­cial to their ideology. The only exception might be their massive support for cultural activities associated with Spanish nationalism, such as bullfighting.

Bullfighting isn’t just a far-right obsession, however. In October, the Spanish parliament repealed a popular legislative initiative that proposed eliminating the legal protection currently enjoyed by bullfighting due to its status as cultural heritage.

Bullfighting has a very strong tradition within Spanish society; it is deeply enshrined in our identity. But can bullfighting be considered a form of culture? The answer is yes, it undeniably belongs to Spanish culture. But it is a type of culture that we do not want to see any longer, because it entails animal torture. And luckily, if you look at surveys, it is an increasingly minoritarian cultural activity, and its support in society is declining. People are becoming more aware of the fact that torture is no longer acceptable in our societies.

But the Right and the far right still defend bullfighting as a culture war against the Left. They say that it is at the core of Spanish national identity, and the Left is attacking it. Now, the problem is that the Socialists are deeply divided on the matter because in some regions they have strong connections to ­fighting traditions. The reason why the popular legislative initiative was rejected in parliament – despite collecting more than 700,000 signatures – is that the Socialists abstained.

But to be honest, I think it is just a matter of time, because young people in particular are turning more and more against animal torture. Bull­fighting will be banned in Spain, sooner or later.

Memory politics is another deep cultural divide in Spanish society. The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco, and the legacy of the dictatorship remains quite contested. How are you navigating these issues?

For many years, we have argued that the far right was not as strong in Spain as in other European countries because our dictatorial past was still too close and its memory too vivid. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Particularly among young generations, there’s very little knowledge about what the dictatorship was, and normalising the far right is increasingly common among young people. What we are trying to do in government, and particularly this year with the anniversary, is to try and explain what Spain was like under the Franco regime.

When it comes to culture specifi­cally, we are trying to complete the democratic transition that was left unfinished. For example, we have taken the initiative to return thousands of art pieces that were seized by the Francoist regime and never given back to their legitimate owners. We are also trying to close down the Franco National Foundation, which essentially promotes Francoist ideas and the legacy of the dictatorship. But in my view, addressing the fading of memory among the Spanish youth is the biggest challenge we face as a society.

The Right and the far right still defend bullfighting as a culture war against the Left.

The dictatorship isn’t the only contested chapter of collective memory. As a culture minister, you’ve spoken out about the need for a reckoning with Spain’s colonial past, including in state museums. Where does the country stand on that front?

Spain has not debated the need to critically address the colonial past in our museums in the way that other countries have done. One of the cases we have studied most closely is the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, where a comprehensive process has been put in place to incorporate decolonial views into the museum. I brought up the issue in Spain because the Museo de América and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid, among others, have not yet had this type of conversation on decolonialism.

When I became minister, one of the things I did was to remove banners in the Museo de América that were openly racist towards Indigenous populations. This was a controversial move because the Right argued that I was meddling with fundamental issues of Spanish history. But we did it anyway, because we thought it was important. And I think more and more people now understand that our museums need to be respectful and grant a voice to those communities that have always been silenced.

I only regret that Spain is a bit late compared to other European countries, but we are catching up now, and this is very positive.

One of your other initiatives as a minister of culture has been the Libro Verde – the Green Paper on the Sustainable Management of Cultural Heritage. How do traditional green priorities like ecology, sustainability, and climate action intersect with the field of culture?

First, cultural activities can and should contribute to the energy transition. The Libro Verde aims to establish policies for our heritage sites and cultural venues to adopt renewable energies and become more energy efficient. For example, the Teatro Real, Madrid’s opera house, now has a roof fully equipped with solar panels, and it is entirely reliant on renewable energy.

But even more important than that, cultural and artistic activities can contribute to the shifts needed in society to fight climate change and adapt to its effects. We know that we need to change the way we live and think, as well as how we organise ourselves as European societies. Culture is an indispensable component of that transformation. This is why we have created the Climate Biennial, a meeting place that will use culture and art to encourage debate and action for a just climate transition.

Climate change is the most critical challenge for Spain, a country with a vast coastline that is struggling with desertification and drought and has already been hit hard by climate-induced disasters such as floods and devastating wildfires. Therefore, it is no surprise that the climate is increasingly present in our movies, literature, and other forms of artistic production. The arts are crucial to help us imagine and bring about a better future.

Another shift that is likely to change the way our societies are organised is the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. Is the cultural sector ready to deal with this transformation? This is a huge debate in Spain. Artists and creators are very worried about the emergence of AI. One of the things they rightly ask is that we take steps to protect human creation. I think that AI can be a powerful tool for creators, but there always needs to be a human behind it in order for the result to be considered a cultural outcome.

Another concern for creators is that large language models are trained with artistic work subject to copyright. Yet AI companies are not paying authors and creators for using their work. This is a critical problem that EU regulation of AI has not solved, and we need to address it urgently. This year, Barcelona hosted MONDIACULT, a major UNESCO conference on cultural policies, bringing together more than 100 culture ministers from all over the world. Fair remuneration for authors in the age of artifi­cial intelligence was one of the measures we called for, and everyone recognises it as a key issue.

Of course, the fact that Europe doesn’t control many of these technologies adds another layer to the challenge. We need Europe to be present in the ­eld of AI. Spain has created a public, open-source AI foundational model called ALIA. Other countries are taking similar actions, but we are lagging behind on the global stage in the race for AI technologies.

Cultural and artistic activities can contribute to the shifts needed in society to fight climate change and adapt to its effects.

Aside from pursuing technological sovereignty, what can the EU do to reinforce a shared sense of European belonging at a time of resurgent nationalism?

Culture was essential in the second part of the 20th century to create a shared sense of European citizenship. We all have favourite musicians, writers, and filmmakers who come from European countries other than our own. The EU’s “cultural exception” protects cultural goods and services from free trade rules because it understands culture as a public good.

We cannot expect European integration to continue progressing in the coming years without a strong cultural component. But we need more effort in that direction. The new Multiannual Financial Framework [MFF, the EU budget for the years 2028-2034] should strengthen our common cultural tools. We hope that the Culture Compass, an initiative the European Commission is developing, can play a role in that.

The issue with culture is that it constantly needs to remind politicians of its value in order to be supported and recognised. I worry that with new priorities like defence and competitiveness, Europe will make the mistake of cutting cultural spending. I can say that this won’t be the case in Spain, and what we know so far about the next MFF suggests that the culture budget will increase at the European level too. But some member states are taking a different course, and that would be a huge mistake. In a tense geopolitical landscape, a strong European cultural sector is more – not less – necessary.