Federico Jiménez Losantos leaves EsRadio: Carlos Cuesta to take over

Losantos announces he is leaving EsRadio for health reasons

Host Federico Jiménez Losantos has announced that he will stop presenting his programme on EsRadio for health reasons. His replacement will be Carlos Cuesta. The announcement sets a date for a retirement that part of his audience had been loudly demanding for years and that another part still sees as an irreparable loss for Spanish radio.

The news has not landed in a vacuum. Those who have listened to him since university, when he was still at COPE, argue that he has clearly been wearing thin for some time; those who still defend him insist that there is no one on the dial who can tell stories like he can. And between the two extremes emerges a much more prosaic controversy: how jobs, contracts and subsidies are shared out in the sector.

What has been announced and who takes the chair

The host is stepping down from the morning slot for health reasons and Carlos Cuesta takes over. It is not the only move: it is also suggested that Dieter Brandau will develop another project, linked to podcast formats. The schedule is being rearranged with two pieces that the most loyal audience knows only too well.

Cuesta's selection divides opinion. Some see him as the station's strongest asset, while others criticise him for teaching economics from the logic of business schools, the kind that explains markets as if they were a neutral mechanism. Both things have been written in the same stretch of the controversy, and neither can be proven with data.

Twenty years repeating the same alucinación to Tibet

The most repeated complaint is not ideological but about fatigue: the anecdotes. The alucinación to Tibet with the king, the two centenarian grandmothers, the same personal episodes told word for word season after season. Anyone who has trinc him since his university days, nearly two decades, says they can anticipate the ending of every story.

Add to that the tone. Growing interruptions of guests and the newsroom itself, and a tendency to know more than anyone about everything: the stock market, US public debt, sport, theatre, gossip. With one specific suspicion on the table: that much of the current affairs with which he builds his monologues comes from unfiltered videos on digital platforms and that, by that account, he has sometimes accepted hoaxes that were circulating out there as true.

Fathers, sons and seats on the schedule

Nepotism has moved to the centre of the criticism. Carlos Herrera brought his son Alberto into his own programme, with an ever-greater presence; Jiménez Losantos is said to have done the same with David Jiménez, a panellist in the station's nighttime slot. The problem flagged is not only the cronyism but its side effect: the same surname also appears on La Brújula on another network, which according to that reading has multiplied cross-mentions between stations.

It is also maintained that there is internal discontent at COPE: that to pay for star signings, teams and technical maintenance have been cut. It is a complaint that circulates without public figures to back it up, and it should be treated as what it is: testimony, not an audit.

The shift that broke his audience

The break with a significant part of his listeners has a date: the handling of the pandemic and the vaccination campaign. "The bleach-drinking affair," summarise those who stopped tuning in then. From there the list of disagreements grows: the defence of NATO, the treatment of Russia, daily attacks on Vox, the alignment with the PP in the Community of Madrid and silence on climate change while the station's own commercial advertising talked about reducing emissions.

On immigration, he is credited with a particularly controversial argument: that the country needs foreign labour, interpreted by some of his audience as a defence of cheap labour. And several accounts dwell on his assessment of the residents of Torre Pacheco who protested, whom, according to one of the accounts collected, he allegedly described as infiltrators interested in stoking the conflict.

Who pays for EsRadio?

No station in this country balances its books on commercial advertising alone, and this one would be no exception according to those who have looked at its numbers. It is claimed that the project is bankrupt without public aid and without institutional contracts, and the PP in the Community of Madrid is pointed to as its main support. In any case, the figures are missing: no one has broken down how much comes from official advertising, how much from sponsorships and how much from concessions.

The comparison is uncomfortable for both sides. While every euro this station receives is debated, other networks and the public broadcaster itself accumulate volumes of public money that barely generate headlines. No one has put the two columns together on the table.

What the handover does not resolve

The announcement has been made. Cuesta takes the microphone, Brandau leaves for another format and the founder remains, on paper, as the station's reference point. What remains unanswered is how much of what he is criticised for — the tone, the editorial line, family cronyism — survives the change of seat. That is where the analysis gets stuck.