A lot of trust and a year and a half of conversations: this is how Irene Lozano wrote the books with Pedro Sánchez

If you are writing a book about a president, you know that every surprise is possible and that is what Irene Lozano, essayist, politician, current director of Casa Arabe and collaborator of Pedro Sánchez in the writing of his two books, has experienced. Resistance manual and the most recent, Mainland (both in the Peninsula). The first was going to portray a fall and ended in a resurrection. And the second was about to suffer the opposite.

Both ―Pedro Sánchez and Irene Lozano― had been working on this political biography for more than a year when the municipal and regional elections of March 28 caused the content to falter and the book was put on hold. “Writing a book about Sánchez is above all exciting,” says Lozano at her home in Madrid. “You never know what is going to happen. You start writing a president's book and, when it is almost finished, suddenly there are moments when it seems that it will not be finished when it is published, ”she confesses. “With Resistance manual “It happened the other way around, we started it when he had just been fired from the party, it was going to be the book of a general secretary who had just been fired, and it ended up being the book of a president.”

The writer receives EL PAÍS at her home, where she shows the folders of material that she has accumulated during a year and a half of work from the interviews she has had with the president, his speeches and other files that nourish Mainland. Graduated in Linguistics and graduated in Philosophy, she worked for a decade as a journalist in The world. Former UPyD deputy, then PSOE and former Secretary of State, she is the author of essays such as They are mills, not giants (Península), in which he warned in 2020 about the danger that social networks pose for democracy; Tongues at war, which earned him the 2005 Espasa Essay Prize, or the biography No, my general (Plaza y Janés), about Zaida Cantera, a Spanish soldier and politician who was an icon of the fight for women's rights by denouncing harassment by a superior in the Army.

—Does it bother you that they call you “Sanchez's black woman”?

-Yeah. I think it's a very ugly expression because it gives the idea that writing is slavery and not a profession. This is a debate that is long overdue in other countries. You choose a professional to do a professional job and being a good, reputable journalist adds value to the book. In French they call it “the plume”. Technically, a “black”, furthermore, is someone who does not appear and that is why the most correct expression is “pen”. But, of course, in Spain going from black to feather… it seems to me that it is not going to happen [ríe].

Lozano (Madrid, 52 years old) is not the “black” or ““ghost writer” (ghost writer, as this figure is called in English) of Sánchez's books, but the open collaborator of this first-person chronicle of the president that covers the last four years of Spanish politics, and has appeared as such from the beginning. “Writing a president's book seems to me to be a unique experience, very valuable for a writer and journalist,” she says. “I think I have a very deep knowledge of his thoughts, there are many hours of conversation with him, speaking in confidence about issues that come up in the conversation and that later are included or not in the book, and being at the center of one of the most important information machines in the country is unique. It has been very hard work at times, the amount of information you manage overwhelms you, here it is,” she says, pointing to her workplace.

Lozano could have had an initial script that they both defined and that included the pandemic, Ukraine, European patriotism, inequality, ecological transformation or the digital transition, but he never finished incorporating new materials that arose during the mandate itself. Until they chose the final point: 23-J, the general elections that he brought forward after the defeat on 28-M and in which, although he came second, he stopped what seemed like a certain victory for the right.

Today Lozano explains the making of of a book whose process was lively and changing, as it could not be otherwise when dealing with an active president. The two met at a gathering in The night in 24 hours (TVE), when she was a UPyD deputy, but trust arose much later. “When he offered me to run on the PSOE lists in the 2015 elections, we hadn't even had a coffee. We were neither friends nor anything remotely similar,” she says. When UPyD collapsed and they met for the first time, Sánchez told her that she had admired her behavior and loyalty to the leader of this party. “I was elegant with Rosa Díez, much more than she deserved. That was when we started dealing with each other and a relationship of trust began to be generated, but we were not friends.”

After a failed legislature, there were elections in 2016, for which Lozano – he says – told Sánchez that he did not want to repeat. “The experience had not been good, there was a lot of internal war in the party. And when I was already away, I wrote to him one day and proposed: 'I have an interesting project in mind: should I come over for a coffee and tell you?' The two met, Lozano proposed a book with his experience, “he thought it was a good idea and that's how it started.” As? “I'll interview you and tell you.” And what can we tell? “The adventures of your election as general secretary and your political project.” “He told me yes, and he could have just stayed there, but he believes that writing is good.” The issue was put aside while Sánchez was focused on the problems of the moment, but, after his fall as general secretary, they took it up again. “When they fired him, he told me: 'Irene, let's go back to discuss the book you proposed to me.' He took it back.” The result was Resistance manual.

Mainland has had a different path. This time it was he who proposed it and his objective, he points out, has been to convey a “hopeful vision” in the face of the country's challenges after more than 40 years of a successful democracy. To do this, they met in 12 interviews, which generally lasted an hour and a half or two, with exceptions such as the three hours they could have been there when he had the last covid and had to cancel his schedule; or the one that was put on hold in the midst of the heat of the war in Ukraine. Also hundreds of whatsappemails and audios that Lozano sought to “incorporate experiences and prevent it from being just a theoretical and official text.”

“When I saw that he was in Ukraine, at a summit or on some occasion that could contribute something significant, I asked him to tell me his impressions, things that he might not remember later. Sometimes he sent me an audio, a whatsap, or he didn't pay attention to me, of course. Logically, she had more important things to attend to.” This is how he recounts experiences such as, for example, his conversation with a Ukrainian woman on a walk through Borodianka with the Danish Prime Minister. “That woman had seen that the Russians carried their dress uniforms in their backpacks. “Those soldiers believed they were going to arrive and parade.”

The most difficult thing about the book? Addressing party issues without offending people's sensitivities is very important, which led us to measure all the allusions with a magnifying glass. At one point, he asked her to remove all the names of ministers so that no one would notice the absences, which emptied the book of protagonists and key figures such as the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, in the pandemic, but that was redirected . He also wanted to refer to Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and he kept it that way. Introducing the personal side of him was the other. “He has to be president 24 hours a day and there are things that have cost a lot, logically he protects his privacy.” The book manages to capture family moments, such as the presence and importance of his parents or the chat in which he shares music with his daughters, whom he always keeps out of the public sphere. “I had to shoehorn all that out of him,” he says.

Finding the right tone was another of the book's challenges, especially in addressing a pandemic that had caused so much suffering. “He was very clear about it, many people had lost loved ones and he wanted me to be empathetic, we talked about that a lot. I started there and when I wrote those first 30 or 40 pages of the pandemic, I sent them to him to see if he liked the tone, he said yes and we threw the whole book away.

The genre of biographies of politicians written by professionals knows cases in which the protagonist has not even read it. How much has Sánchez read? “He has read it all and more than once. For most of the time, the book is between him and me. I suggested such an approach, remove, put… It was a back and forth job. There are also personal anecdotes that he has written directly and that he sent me by email. The title is yours, Mainland, and he came to it because the main idea of ​​the book is that we are in moments of uncertainty around the world, but when the necessary transitions are completed we will reach that solid ground. It is their long-term vision and the political destination to reach.”

In a president's book, Lozano adds, “many people participate.” The manuscript also passed through people close to Sánchez and was subjected to a fact check exhaustive by the publisher. “The result is an impeccable book in terms of data, all verified with official sources, international organizations, Social Security, Ministry of Labor, etc.”

But the biggest challenge, without a doubt, was the back-and-forth that occurred with the defeat in May. “When the elections were brought forward, the book was put on hold because, depending on the result, it had to be different,” he says. With the match point What the July election was like, a ball in the net that could tip everything, Sánchez's usual luck did the rest. Lozano added a detailed prologue that undoubtedly captures the president's most personal side; The humor that he claims is common to him and that he displayed when the Perro Sánchez meme appeared. And the book ended up being, once again, a winner. “I think he,” Lozano concludes, “would like to write. I have that impression.”

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