Contextual Preamble

I write this article with a discomfort I don't want to hide. I have been part of the conflict I am trying to reconstruct. I have shared hopes, fatigue, discussions, successes, and mistakes with many of the people who appear in this story. I am not, therefore, looking at this from an external and untainted perspective. I am part of the assembly of my workplace, of the CADPV, of the STEPV-IV, and of the EUPV. For this reason, there is a loyalty more difficult than the simple defense of one's own: loyalty to the facts. This loyalty requires acknowledging what we failed to do, what we misinterpreted, or what we still cannot explain.

I am not neutral if neutrality means placing racism and anti-racism, sexism and feminism, praise of Francoism and democracy, climate denial and scientific knowledge on the same footing. I don't believe that rigor requires pretending that all claims have the same value. It requires cross-checking sources, distinguishing facts from interpretations, acknowledging uncertainty, showing the limits of the evidence, and subjecting one's own convictions to the possibility of being wrong. Objectivity is not the absence of a position, but a discipline of cross-checking, justification, and correction.

This issue is not external to the conflict I am reconstructing. After the teaching staff demonstrated during the strike their ability to organize, intervene publicly, and challenge the educational policies of the Council, the Popular Party (PP) and Vox have tried to place them under suspicion again through an expansive conception of "ideological neutrality." The controversy therefore affects both academic and professional freedom inside the classroom and the legitimacy of teachers to act as a political subject outside it. Which is more appropriate when speaking of underfunding and the model of the state. VOX is a splinter of the PP, part of the global reactionary wave; according to Steven Forti, it is part of the 2.0 far right. Unlike historical fascism, it does not fight democracy, but is content to use its institutions to turn certain democratic gains—equality, feminism, antifranquista memory, linguistic pluralism, or critical education— into supposed ideological impositions, while presenting its own reactionary, nativist, exclusionary nationalist, recentralizing, and authoritarian program as neutrality, freedom, or common sense.

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I. The war of movement: an offensive that pushed back the Ministry and overwhelmed its own organization. The Valencian educational conflict of 2025-2026 between mobilization, organization, and material limits

Introduction. Returning to the Conflict from Another Distance

The reconstruction is based on communiqués, calls, public events, press, official statistics, negotiation documents, consultations, and digital traces, as well as on my testimony as a situated, participant observer. This material allows for the fixing of dates and decisions, but it requires distinguishing between document, testimony, and inference. A statement attests to an organization's position, a news report to what it publishes or attributes, and a testimony can reconstruct a practice without becoming a written document.

Understanding the conflict also requires reconstructing the logic of the other side. Understanding the adversary is not practicing equidistance. Analyzing what the main institutional figures were saying publicly requires also identifying the positions they held. María del Carmen Ortí was the Minister of Education, Culture, and Universities; Daniel McEvoy, Autonomous Community Secretary of Education; Pablo Ortega, Director General of Teaching Staff. Jorge Cabo was Director General of Educational Centers and Juanfran Pérez Llorca, President of the Generalitat. It is necessary to observe which limits they invoked, how they modified their proposals, and how the PP and Vox reacted. Doing so does not mean placing the administration that implemented the questioned policies and the teaching staff who opposed them on the same level. A strategic analysis focused only on the movement's decisions, mistakes, successes, and contradictions would leave a decisive part of the balance of power unexplained. Throughout the text, I distinguish between documented actions, observable effects, and strategic inferences. The sequence of statements, promises, timelines, and offers allows us to study how the Ministry acted and learned, but it does not automatically turn its moves into proof of a single, pre-established internal plan. The PP, however, is part of a political field that advocates neoliberal policies, governs with Vox, and is also inscribed in economic, political, social, and cultural power relations with deep historical roots, reconfigured after 1939 and later adapted to democracy.

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