Federico Jimenez Losantos

Federico Jorge Jiménez Losantos (Orihuela del Tremedal, Teruel, September 15, 1951) is a Spanish journalist, publicist, writer, broadcaster and businessman.

Since September 2009, he has been the director and presenter of the radio program Es la mañana de Federico, on the esRadio network (also broadcast on Libertad Digital Televisión), and a columnist for the newspaper El Mundo . He is co-owner, editor and collaborator of the digital newspaper Libertad Digital and the magazine La Ilustración Liberal , which he also directs.

Fervent and openly anti-communist, Jiménez Losantos is known for his particular style of doing radio, with a marked use of irony and cultural references, as well as calling nicknames and nicknames, often offensive, and insults to the various characters of current Spanish politics. The latter has earned him some lawsuits from the aforementioned.

Biography

His father was a shoemaker and served as mayor of Orihuela del Tremedal His mother was a Mathematics teacher and he was the grandson of teachers.

Jiménez Losantos is the eldest of three brothers. At the age of ten, he won a rural scholarship that he kept throughout his studies, thanks to which he attended high school at the San Pablo College and High School in Teruel. In this center he had as teachers the singer-songwriter, poet (and, later, politician) José Antonio Labordeta and the playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra. At sixteen he published his first poems and stories.

He studied Philosophy and Letters at the University of Zaragoza and in 1971 moved to study Spanish Philology at the University of Barcelona. He graduated with a thesis on the annotations to the grotesques of Valle-Inclán, directed by Joaquim Marco. The court, chaired by José Manuel Blecua, unanimously awarded him an outstanding award.

He was an associate professor of the Baccalaureate of Spanish Language and Literature, in the 1980/1981 academic year he worked at the National Institute of Secondary Education number one in Santa Coloma de Gramanet (Barcelona), from where he transferred to the Lope National Institute of Baccalaureate de Vega de Madrid and in 1982 he went on leave of absence.

He studied psychoanalysis with Óscar Masotta and was one of the founders of the Freudian Library of Barcelona, as well as the university Revista de Literatura. In January 1978, together with Alberto Cardín, he founded and directed the thought magazine on politics, philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis Diwan, which was considered by the newspaper El País as "The most important, open and lively cultural magazine of the moment". He helped to spread the work of the philosopher François Lyotard in Spain, with his critical edition of Discurso, figura in 1979.

That same year he won the First Essay Prize from the publishing house El Viejo Topo for his work La cultura española y el nacionalismo. However, this publisher subsequently refused to publish the book What remains of Spain because, according to El Viejo Topo, they were in a process of restricting the number of titles to be published. Then the publisher would add that some chapters were "unpublishable."

The magazine Ajoblanco, which competed in the market with El Viejo Topo, was finally in charge of publishing the book. The work was presented by Francisco Umbral and had the support of the newspaper El País —including the support of Javier Pradera and Juan Luis Cebrián—. The book would be published again in 1995.

What Remains of Spain criticized Catalan nationalism and defended the cultural rights of Spanish-speakers. This began a long controversy that culminated, some time later, with the Manifesto of the 2,300.

Leftist and anti-Franco militancy

In the last years of the Franco regime, he was active in two clandestine organizations of the anti-Franco left: the Communist Organization of Spain (Red Flag), of Maoist ideology, and in the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, of communist ideology.

He collaborated in magazines and artistic groups (Grupo Trama) of the extreme left. However, he was reorienting his positions as a result of a trip to the People's Republic of China in 1976, from which he got the impression that reality did not coincide with the values of the ideology in which he was a militant.^{[quote required]}

Already in the Transition, he entered the military in the Socialist Party of Aragón (a party outside the orbit of the PSOE, belonging to the now extinct Federation of Socialist Parties), which obtained a deputy (Emilio Gastón) in the constituent Legislature from Spain.

Before the first regional elections in Catalonia, in 1980, the presentation of a candidacy by this party was considered, in which Jiménez Losantos would occupy the first place. The candidacy did not appear due to the opposition of the PSOE and the Socialist Party of Andalusia (led by Alejandro Rojas-Marcos).

Finally, Jiménez Losantos ran as a candidate for the Andalusian Socialist Party. Catalonia was a region that had had a large Andalusian immigration. Losantos based his speech on defending the cultural and civic rights of all Spanish immigrants. According to his speech, these were not well defended by the PSOE-PSC or the PCE-PSUC. According to him, those parties had failed to protect the Andalusian workers because they were influenced by Catalan nationalism. The Andalusian Socialist Party won two seats.

These parliamentarians (who were almost the only deputies who spoke in Spanish in the Parliament of Catalonia)^{[citation required]} focused on defending the right of the Spanish-speaking population of Catalonia to preserve their language, which in their opinion has been violated, without addressing other issues.

The fact that he had presented himself as a candidate for the Andalusian Socialist Party led him to a confrontation within the Diwan magazine with Alberto Cardín, who defended the magazine's political independence. This incident led to the end of his collaboration with the newspaper El País and he went on to join Diario 16 at the hands of Fernando Sánchez Dragó.

Diario 16 was directed by Pedro J. Ramírez. On January 25, 1981, this publication published the Manifesto of the 2300, in which they opposed the law on linguistic immersion of Catalan in school education.

Four months later, on May 21, 1981, he was kidnapped by the Catalan independence terrorist organization Terra Lliure (which did not publicly announce its existence until June 24). After being shot in the knee by Pere Bascompte and being abandoned in the vicinity of Santa Coloma de Gramanet tied to a tree, he was released by the police the same day.

After the event, Jiménez Losantos and other signatories of the Manifesto, such as Amando de Miguel, Carlos Sahagún and Santiago Trancón, left Catalonia. Years later (on January 31, 2007) he declared in an interview for television (La noche de Quintero, on TVE-1), referring to those who had shot him: «the only thing that I refused is to liquidate those who shot me, and they offered it to me ».

ABC and Antena 3

In 1982, he settled in Madrid and went from collaborating in El País to doing so in Diario 16.

He combined this work with his literature classes at the Lope de Vega Institute. In 1986 he was promoted to head of opinion in said newspaper and was a columnist in Cambio 16 . In 1987 he signed as a columnist for ABC , the leading newspaper of the Madrid press.

In the early 1990s, he began collaborating with the Antena 3 radio network. With the appearance of private television in Spain, he began collaborating with Antena 3 Televisión, where he directed cultural programs such as La Historia of the Spanish Jews. He was a political commentator for the Luis Herrero news program and, later, for the Fuego Cruzado section of Informativos Telecinco.

During this stage he maintained his daily column on ABC and was a regular guest on late-night radio programs such as Hora Cero by José Luis Balbín and, later, on The Lantern by Luis Herrero, at the COPE.

COPE and Digital Freedom

Esperanza Aguirre in an interview with Federico Jiménez Losantos

In 1992, the communication group formed by Antena 3 Radio and Antena 3 Televisión was dissolved, leaving the first medium in the hands of the PRISA group. This operation was quite controversial. Given this, a group of journalists, including José María García, Antonio Herrero, Luis Herrero and Federico Jiménez Losantos himself, entered the COPE radio network. The antenicide (as they call it) and the subsequent actions before the courts have always marked a critical and aggressive editorial policy with the PRISA group and also with the successive PSOE governments.

In 1998, after the death of Antonio Herrero in a diving accident, Luis Herrero took over the program La Mañana and Jiménez Losantos was in charge of the night program La Linterna. After the departure of Luis Herrero in 2003, he went on to direct and present the morning show, a program that rose to one of the highest audience ratings on Spanish radio.

Months later, Luis Herrero would stand for the elections to the European Parliament within the Popular Party lists. In 2005, Herrero rejoined Jiménez Losantos's morning show as a guest speaker.

In April 2009, COPE (for some, obeying orders from certain sectors of the PP that felt annoyed with Jiménez Losantos) proposed that he abandon the presentation of La Mañana to present La Linterna from 10 to 12 at night. Jiménez Losantos did not accept and decided to continue his radio activity in a new station esRadio, of the Libertad Digital group, together with César Vidal, also recently left his COPE program, and Luis Herrero, who returned to radio after passing through the European Parliament.

As a complement to his incessant radio activity, in 2000 Jiménez Losantos promoted the publication of a new exclusively electronic newspaper, Libertad Digital, of which he is currently the editor. In 1999 he left the newsroom of ABC after a decade and became part of the list of collaborators of El Mundo , where he continues to publish the column Monday, Wednesday and Friday "Liberal Comments". Reciprocally, his former director, Pedro J. Ramírez, has also collaborated on his morning radio programs, including the one on COPE, as a commentator. Since 1998, he has also been editor of the thought magazine La Ilustración Liberal .

Character and ideology

Jiménez Losantos was a member of the opposition to Francoism^{[citation required]} and in various left-wing organizations during the 1970s. Since the end of the Transition and from In the 1980s, Jiménez Losantos began to define himself as a liberal, in the classic sense of the term. In the S. xxi, denounced communism. Its defenders consider it a reference for a whole new trend of young liberals who identify with the editorial line of Digital Freedom. Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas describes him as a "conservative publicist".

He has also publicly declared his atheism, having been raised in his childhood within the values and sociology of Catholicism and Christianity, for which he has described himself as a "Catholic atheist".

Until 2013, he showed his sympathy for the political party formed, among others, by the former socialist MEP Rosa Díez, called Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD), acknowledging that he had voted for it and declaring:

Now, the national party with more renewed possibilities and with less ideological corsés is UPyD. It is not a liberal party, it is rather social-democratic, but except some part of the PP, such as Esperanza Aguirre in Madrid or Bauzá in the Balearic Islands, which are more liberal, in the Popular Party are conservative and many times are as socialist as the socialists. But there's no liberal party and there's no need for it either. I would rather have liberals in all parties, including the PSOE.

After the emergence of the Vox political party, Losantos expressed his sympathy for this new party and claimed to have voted for it in the 2014 European elections. to open up to Spain with two MEPs in the same European elections in 2014. Until now, he has admitted voting for this party in the general elections of 2015 and 2016, although in the regional and municipal elections in Madrid he preferred to vote for the Popular Party.

In view of the 2018-2019 electoral processes, he was in agreement with Ciudadanos, Partido Popular and Vox on different issues. Regarding Ciudadanos, he affirmed that, although there are things in which they differ, "it is the least bad option to achieve a result that has strength and weight in the institutions", although he has subsequently directed harsh criticism of the party and especially his former leader, Albert Rivera.

Both people on the left and right are often among his detractors. For this reason, journalists such as Luis del Olmo or Iñaki Gabilondo, or the humorist Andreu Buenafuente, expressed their rejection of Jiménez Losantos when he received the Golden Microphone award.

His journalistic and intellectual work has been marked since his journalistic beginnings by his radical confrontation with communism, ETA, peripheral nationalisms, socialism and the left in general. He bases the root of his critical reactions to both in his conception of the defense of individual freedom ^{[ citation needed ]} and the consideration of Spain as a State- guarantee nation. The origin of his confrontation with nationalisms lies in his criticism of the linguistic legislation initiated and developed in Catalonia by the governments of Jordi Pujol (CiU) with the support of a very large majority of the political groups represented in the Parliament of Catalonia. Losantos has always considered this legislation discriminatory against Spanish speakers. His controversies with the left center on criticism of his interventionist policies in the cultural and economic spheres. At present, Losantos criticizes the interested passivity before processes that attempt, in his opinion, against the spirit of the 1978 Constitution in what refers to the equality of all Spaniards before the law. He considers this equality in danger due to the approval of the new statute of autonomy for Catalonia, which makes some references to it as a nation within Spain (hence, he accuses José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of practicing policies that lead to "reduction to ashes"). of the constitutional regime of 1978»).

He also repeatedly declared himself opposed to any negotiation process with the terrorist group ETA. The fact that the government of Rodríguez Zapatero carried out a negotiation with the band, produced an increase in his objections to his policy. According to Losantos, Zapatero would carry out this policy in order to remain in power based on concessions that, although they could be popular, would be profoundly wrong. The complicity with ETA extends to the current ruling left and, thus, about the PSOE he expresses: «The PSOE has shown that in the government it can kill, slander...», «This is the ETA government».

He is also one of the most prominent exponents of the conspiracy theories surrounding the 11-M attack that cast doubt on the judicial investigation. They are defended by his supporters as an attempt to search for the truth. In his opinion, the attack "was perpetrated to throw the PP out of power and change the history of Spain at its roots." Jiménez Losantos, during a talk with the readers of Libertad Digital, when asked by an anonymous participant who described Zapatero as a "terrorist" for "legalizing terrorist parties to stand in elections" and "meeting with them to talk in secret", stated that "Zapatero has a huge and growing responsibility in 11-M".

He spoke out in favor of judicial independence and criticized the pressure exerted by the PNV on the judicial bodies in the case of the prosecution of lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe. He has also denounced that the prosecution has had a series of politicized actions in relation to the 11-M process:

Prosecutors have become ETA judicial agents. (COPE, TomorrowJanuary 26, 2007) [...] The prosecutors are ETA's lawyers. (COPE, Tomorrow7 February 2007.)

The Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalist sectors accuse him of being fixated on everything related to nationalism and of holding an openly anti-nationalist position by accusing the nationalist parties of being "accomplices of ETA", "anti-constitutional" and "enemies of Spain". Some nationalist sector sometimes blames him on a supposed resentment for the terrorist attack he suffered. He has denounced the relationship between the Catalan independence political party ERC and the Catalan terrorist organization Terra Lliure, since the former includes several former members of the latter, which was definitively dissolved in 1995.

The criticisms made by Jiménez Losantos are not limited to the left or to nationalisms, but to anyone whom he "considers wrong", regardless of his political formation:

And if the murdered councillors were from the PNV, we wouldn't have seen the Rustic demagogueAl. Stupid extreme, take advantage of a sperm like that of silly. of Bartolin to snatch against the martyr's party saying it was a trick to get out a lot on TV.

Thus, after suggesting to the subscribers of the conservative daily ABC that they unsubscribe from the newspaper because of its editorial line, there was a sharp decline in its sales. The Vocento group, owner of ABC, filed a complaint against the journalist and the COPE network for "unfair competition" in 2006. The court order issued by a commercial judge granted precautionary measures against Losantos because, according to said order: "Freedom of expression does not include the right to insult, because neither this is a right nor would that be a freedom." The order, unprecedented as it was issued by a commercial court in the case of a matter related to freedom of expression, includes an a priori list of adjectives and disqualifying expressions that "as a precaution" could not continue to be used However, before the appeal filed by said order, the Provincial Court of Madrid revoked the order not to use the expressions included in the "black list" mentioned above. In its ruling, the Court considers that limiting what Losantos can or cannot say, as the Commercial Court had ruled, may constitute "prior censorship of press freedom." In addition, the Court considers that uttering these expressions cannot be considered to constitute an act of unfair competition, although others not included in the list in which they openly invited to unsubscribe from the ABC newspaper could be.

There are also numerous criticisms made of Josep Piqué, Javier Arenas and, on occasions, Mariano Rajoy himself. He frequently calls the members of the Popular Party "maricomplexes" and considered that the party leaders during the IX Legislature between 2008 and 2011, instead of making a real opposition to the government, had turned the PP into the P& Party #39;help. With this he intends to denounce the inferiority complex that the Spanish right would have:

Rajoy has shown with the facts that the PP has learned nothing of its failure in the truce-trap. The Right has shown again that the script The silence of the lambs He wrote thinking about her. It's not easy for Rajoy to admit a mistake, as we see. But it is that the debate on the state of the nation is worse than a bad day and much more than a mistake. It was, is and will always be a crime. The passive euthanasia of a political force is not acceptable when euthanasia is active against the nation. The PP cannot passively accept that the ETA-PSOE pact is consumed thinking that later or later it will come down and the ovin masses They'll call him whipping into power. Instead of coming down you can come over. And of the liberticide and the scoundrel there is absolutely no one. Neither the PP nor Spain.

Jiménez Losantos has many detractors, some of whom have sometimes launched attacks and disqualifications against him. His program is among the most listened to on Spanish radio, and those who buy his books by thousands (his last book it sold out 30,000 copies the same day it went on sale).

Lawsuits and judgments

The journalist's aggressive style has led to a long series of lawsuits and court convictions throughout his career.

Since 2007, several court rulings have been failed, as a result of different lawsuits filed by politicians, organizations and journalists, the object of their criticism.

On February 22, 2007, the Provincial Court of Barcelona handed down a sentence condemning the COPE chain and Federico Jiménez Losantos to pay 60,000 euros to the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and Josep-Lluís Carod- Rovira and Joan Puigcercós, president and general secretary respectively of the aforementioned political party, for illegitimate interference in their honor. The sentence, against which the convicted party filed an appeal, resolved an appeal of appeal filed by the plaintiffs before the dismissal of the claim in first instance and was based on certain expressions made by Federico Jiménez Losantos in the program La Mañana of the COPE network on days 13, 14, 15 of June and July 1, 2005 against Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and the aforementioned leaders:

The defendant does not deny the expressions denounced, which are transcribed in the letter of claim. However, for better expositive clarity, it is necessary to indicate that after hearing the CD provided, it turns out that, in general, the journalist sued equates the plaintiffs with the terrorist organization ETA. He qualifies ERC as "the allied separatist party of the ETA. The one who fought in Perpignan with the ETA that the earras put bomb cars, for example, that killed people from all over Spain but in Catalonia, "unrepentful pistoleros", "...and others the shot in the back of the neck". He says: “there are many people who ignore that ERC is an always violent, always coupling party”; “a paranoid party, similar to fascism”; “Terrorists rule in Catalonia.” He also qualifies his members as “majaderos” and “mandrias”.

This sentence was ratified on December 15, 2009 by the Court of Barcelona. Subsequently, the Supreme Court revoked it, upholding the appeal of Losantos and COPE on February 4, 2010.

On November 13, 2008, Federico Jiménez Losantos was once again sentenced, in a non-final sentence, to pay another 60,000 euros to the Republican Left of Catalonia for non-material damages as a result of the lawsuit for injuries that this party filed against the broadcaster for an article published in 2007 in the newspaper El Mundo in which he stated that all the ERC headquarters had “weapons and ammunition”. El Mundo was also forced to publish the sentence in its daily edition. The Provincial Court of Barcelona confirmed this sentence in December 2009.

In February 2008, Jiménez Losantos was sentenced by the Court of First Instance number 30 of Barcelona to pay 3,000 euros for describing magistrate Carlos Fanlo as a "terrorist" in his book Overnight. The miracle of COPE. In a chapter of that book, he replied to a 2005 article by Fanlo in which he was addressed as follows: "if the Terra Lliure terrorists had shot you in the heart, nothing would have injured you because you lack it." The sentence considered that the expressions used by Fanlo, who died on June 10, 2007, "are worthy of causing offense and grief", but he also recalled that Fanlo later apologized. The court understood that Losantos' actions were not protected by the right to freedom of expression and that Fanlo's honor was injured. Losantos' defense announced the challenge to the sentence.

On June 16, 2008, Criminal Court number 6 of Madrid sentenced Federico Jiménez Losantos to pay a fine of 36,000 euros, half of what the prosecutor requested, as the perpetrator of a continuous crime of serious insults against the mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón. On June 21, 2006, Ruiz-Gallardón had announced the filing of a lawsuit against Losantos, the day after he stated that the mayor of Madrid "doesn't care if there are 200 dead and 1,500 injured as long as he comes to power". This expression, made in the program La Mañana, alluded to the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid. Losantos reproached the mayor for his lack of interest in thoroughly investigating the authorship of the attack. He also described him as a "traitor", "sinister", "bandit", "a lackey of the Government" and "cheeky". In May 2008, the first session of the trial took place. Witnesses proposed by Jiménez Losantos, such as Esperanza Aguirre, Ángel Acebes and Eduardo Zaplana, testified in a way that was not satisfactory for the presenter's defense. According to the sentence:

The defendant, on the one hand imputed false facts... and on the other, repeatedly used insults and disqualifications with gravely offensive accusations that affect the dignity of the complainant... The prophesied expressions are so clearly insulting or hurtful that the specific mood is tiny in them... There is no doubt that they intended to veto the image and dignity of the plaintiff in an unnecessary and free way and publicly discredit him as Mayor of the Villa de Madrid and as a member of the Popular Party.

Losantos announced that it would appeal the sentence before the Provincial Court of Madrid, which confirmed the sentence in May 2009.

In relation to this ruling, the European Court of Human Rights protected Jiménez Losantos, for failing to protect his freedom of expression, in a ruling issued on June 14, 2016 establishing that the fine of 36,000 euros imposed on the journalist is not compatible with the freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 10 of the Convention. The ruling was adopted by six votes to one, that of judge ad hoc Blanca Lozano Cutanda, who saw the amount of the fine imposed on Losantos as proportionate.

On July 29, 2008, the Court of First Instance number 69 of Madrid sentenced him to pay a fine of 100,000 euros, when describing the insults of Losantos to the former director of the newspaper ABC, José Antonio Zarzalejos, carried out in various programs in which he collaborates at COPE during 2006 and 2007, as "illegitimate interference in the right to honor". He was also sentenced to read the ruling in its entirety on his radio program La Mañana, as well as to pay the costs of the mandatory advertising of the ruling that he must publish in the newspapers El Mundo , El País and ABC.

The ruling stated that:

... the use by Don Federico Jiménez Losantos of the terms dedicated to the plaintiff and reflected in the basis of third law of this resolution and in general the contents in the table contained in the preliminary fact of the lawsuit, or of any synonyms, constitutes an illegitimate intrusion in the fundamental right to the honor of D. José-Antonio Zarzalejos Nieto.

The Provincial Court of Madrid upheld Losantos' appeal on June 9, 2010, citing TC ruling no. 160/2003, of September 15:

...the right to freedom of expression includes criticism of the conduct of the other, even if the same is disavowed and may disturb, disquiete or dislike the one who addresses it, as pluralism, tolerance and the spirit of openness require, without which there is no democratic society.

On March 2, 2011, the First Chamber of the Supreme Court confirmed that Jiménez Losantos and the COPE chain had violated the honor of Canal Sur journalist Tom Martín Benítez, and that for this reason they had to compensate him with 3,000 euros. The sentence confirms the conviction in the first instance by a court in Seville, for statements by Jiménez Losantos in the COPE in June 2005, made on the basis of false news published by the newspaper El Mundo. Although this conviction in the first instance of Jiménez Losantos and the COPE chain was later revoked by the Provincial Court of Seville, the Supreme Court once again included both in the sentence in its judgment of March 2, 2011.

On April 6, 2018, the Federico Jiménez Losantos program was once again sanctioned by a resolution of the National Markets and Competition Commission for an amount of 17,000 euros for a crime of "incitement to hatred&# 34;.

In May 2019, he was sentenced by the Provincial Court of Madrid to pay 10,000 euros to Carolina Bescansa for the crime of "illegitimate interference with honor", after insulting her and her few-month-old son, after a controversy because the Podemos politician attended a session of Congress with her baby. The sentence was appealed to the Supreme Court, which again sentenced Losantos, although it reduced the amount of compensation by half (5,000 euros)..

Likewise, in September 2019 Losantos was sentenced to pay compensation of 3,000 euros to Irene Montero for the crime of "illegitimate interference and injury to the right to honor" that the radio announcer would have committed when attacking politics on his radio program.In March 2020 the Provincial Court of Madrid annulled this sentence. In May 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal filed by Irente Montero, arguing that "the questioned expressions are protected by freedom of expression since they were addressed to a public figure" and, "no matter how hurtful it may be to the plaintiff and no matter how stark the terms used, she is protected by freedom of expression".

Journalistic style

The radio style of Jiménez Losantos is characterized by the spontaneous and discursive use of language, full of satire, irony and criticism. He also makes extensive use of silences, ritornellos , vocatives, and rhetorical questions. His humanistic training allows him to combine traditional twists and popular expressions (such as proverbs) with others from a cultured and enlightened register (such as classic literary quotes). His style in print is equally colloquial.^{[citation needed ]}

However, what most characterizes the style of Jiménez Losantos and makes it unmistakable in current Spanish radio journalism is his relatively frequent use of harsh expressions, nicknames and statements. Jiménez Losantos has been convicted in four judicial processes for violation of the right to honor and in two other processes (in non-final sentences) for a crime of insults. On occasions, he uses derogatory nicknames to refer to characters from and makes statements that have caused him to have to face various lawsuits filed against him. Some of his statements and expressions have been described as "offensive and defamatory" and "insults and disqualifications".

Work

Federico Jiménez Losantos has combined journalism throughout a good part of his career with the publication of essays of a markedly political nature.

In 1979 Ajoblanco —a rival magazine of El Viejo Topo, the latter publication which had refused to publish the essays by Jiménez Losantos— published What remains of Spain, a work where the author criticized the renunciation of the idea of Spain by the political left.

After settling in Madrid, he published anthologies commented on the essays and speeches of Manuel Azaña, president of the Second Republic, of whom he was a great admirer until he read the books by Pío Moa on that period.

After a ten-year literary drought, he published The Silent Dictatorship, a celebrated essay on the fall of Eastern European regimes and a new warning about what he then called the “totalitarian mechanisms in Spanish democracy”, focusing on Basque and Catalan nationalism.

In the 1990s he published collections of articles drawn from his collaborations in ABC, the magazine Época and the newspaper El Mundo. In 1994 he won the Espejo de España prize, awarded by the Planeta publishing house, for the biographical essay Manuel Azaña's Last Exit .

In 2004 he published the first chat book with the readers of the newspaper Libertad Digital under the title Federico responds.

In 2006 he published Overnight. El milagro de la COPE, part political essay, part memoir about his last eight years at the COPE network, since the death of Antonio Herrero (the previous director of La Mañana), and that have ended up making him the most controversial journalist, and one of the most influential in Spain today.

In line with the tradition of essays and comparative studies of political tendencies, in 2018 Jiménez Losantos published Memoria del comunismo in which he analyzes this ideology since its birth in the XIX until its subsequent practical application in the world. In November 2020, Jiménez Losantos published The Return of Communism where he analyzes current political and social issues.

Poetry

• Diván de Albarracín (ISBN 84-85762-07-X) Madrid: Trieste, October 1982.
• Lost poetry (1969-1999) (ISBN 84-8191-396-0) Valencia: Pre-Textos, May 2001.
• The other life. Haikus of snow, water, light and fog. Today's topics: Barcelona, 2009.

Essay

• What is left of Spain, articles (ISBN 978-84-85663-00-2) Barcelona, June 1979; reprinting and enlargement in: (ISBN 84-7880-538-9) Madrid, May 1995; (ISBN 978-8460-716-8), Madrid, 2008.
• Against Philipismarticles (ISBN 84-7880-338-6) Madrid, December 1993.
• The last exit of Manuel Azaña (ISBN 84-08-01121-9) Barcelona, May 1994.
• The silent dictatorship (ISBN 84-7880-610-5) Madrid, January 1996.
• Chronicles of the endse, articles (ISBN 84-7880-653-9) Madrid, May 1996.
• Ours: 100 lives in the history of Spain (ISBN 84-08-03304-2) Barcelona, May 2000.
• With Aznar and against Aznar: articles and essays 1983-2002 (ISBN 84-9734-081-7) Madrid, November 2002.
• Aznar's goodbye, articles (ISBN 84-08-05094-X) Barcelona, February 2004.
• Federico replies: the chats of Libertad Digital (ISBN 84-9734-224-0) Madrid, September 2004.
• Spain and freedom, articles (ISBN 84-270-3249-8), Madrid, April 2006.
• From night to morning(ISBN 84-9734-549-5), Madrid, October 2006.
• The city that was: Barcelona, 1970s, memoirs (ISBN 978-84-8460-642-0), Madrid, 2007.
• More Spain and more freedom, articles (ISBN 978-84-8460-642-0), Madrid, 2008.
• with César Vidal: History of Spain. From the first settlers to the Catholic Kings (ISBN 978-84-08211-8), Barcelona, 2009.
• with César Vidal: History of Spain II. From Juana la Loca to the First Republic (ISBN 978-8-40808-897-4) Barcelona, 2009,
• with César Vidal: History of Spain III. From Restoration to Civil War (ISBN 978-8-40809-459-3) Barcelona, 2010.
• The lynching, memoirs (ISBN 978-84-9970-092-2) Madrid, 2011.
• with César Vidal: History of Spain IV. History of Francoism (ISBN 978-84-08-10716-3) Barcelona, 2012.
• The Lost Years of Mariano Rajoy (ISBN 978-84-9060-574-5) Madrid, 2015.
• Memory of communism. From Lenin to Can (ISBN 978-84-9164-178-0) Madrid, 2018.
• Barcelona, the city that was. The freedom and culture that nationalism destroyed (ISBN 978-84-9164-576-4) Madrid, 2019.
• The Turn of Communism (ISBN 978-84-670-6031-7), Madrid, November 2020.
• The Return of the Right (ISBN 978-84-670-6513-8), Madrid, May 2023.

Awards

He has received the Continente Prize for journalism, the González Ruano Prize in 1993, the Espejo de España Prize in 1994, the Silver Microphone^{[citation required]} in 2000, the Golden Microphone in 2007 in the radio category and the Juan de Mariana Award in 2020.