The insurance company Allianz has announced that it is withdrawing from sponsoring the Festival of Ideas, which will be held in Madrid at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, organized by the company La Fábrica, after 26 participants in the event, including filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen, denounced the collaboration of the German company with the Government of Israel and canceled their presentations. The company’s sponsorship was 124,000 euros. The festival organizers will assume “the loss of the main sponsor. It is not realistic to find another in forty-eight hours,” they told EL MUNDO.
The statement, which also bore the signatures of writers Marta Sanz and Alana S. Portero, musicians Rodrigo Cuevas and Niño de Elche, comedian Inés Hernand and philosophers Paul B. Preciado, Carolina Meloni and Laila Yousef Sandoval, along with other speakers, used the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) argument, the association that promotes the economic blockade of Israel for its policy towards Palestine. According to their information, Allianz has purchased bonds with which Israel has financed the acquisition of weaponry used in Gaza. “Until the festival publicly commits to dissociating itself from Allianz and to not accepting financial support, neither in this nor in future editions, from entities that collaborate with the State of Israel in the destruction of the Palestinian people,” the statement said. “A Festival of Ideas that makes the body its central theme of reflection cannot, at the same time, contribute to whitewashing the economic actors that allow an extermination, an occupation, and an apartheid to take place.”
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According to BDS sources, which also disclose the names of companies they consider complicit in the oppression of Gaza, Allianz was already denounced in 2012 and in 2025 appeared in the report of the official rapporteur Francesca Albanese before the UN, From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide. In her study, Albanese stated that the German insurer has invested 2.67 billion dollars in war bonds issued by the State of Israel since the beginning of the Gaza invasion. Last week, the Spanish section of BDS was preparing a campaign to publicize its accusations against the company, like those it has launched against other firms. At that time, it learned of Allianz’s sponsorship of the Festival of Ideas. Over the weekend, its leaders contacted some participants in the festival who had already collaborated with their actions. Did they suggest the boycott? They named it as one of the possible responses. Did they contact the festival organizers? No. The speakers, BDS assures, organized among themselves and announced their boycott in less than 24 hours.
“This is the second campaign in record time in which we achieved a victory along with the campaign against the screening of The Black Ball at the film festival in occupied Jerusalem. We launched the campaign and the next day it was withdrawn from the festival,” BDS sources explained.
Did you know that the sponsor of the Festival of Ideas, ALLIANZ, is the WORLD’S LARGEST foreign buyer of Israeli “war bonds”? While other funds choose to divest from Israel, ALLIANZ, along with its subsidiary PIMCO, has gone from holding 32 million dollars of these bonds to 2.67 billion.
Message from BDS denouncing Allianz
Sources from the Festival of Ideas organization explained to EL MUNDO on Tuesday morning that they were working “with sponsors and authors” with the aim that “this space for reflection for the public is not lost” and expressed their hope to resolve the problem in the coming hours. At the Festival of Ideas, they assured that their history is full of acts of interest and solidarity towards the Gazan people and recalled that Pankaj Mishra, author of the symbolic essay The World After Gaza, gave the opening lecture in the 2025 edition.
The Festival of Ideas is an initiative of the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid and La Fábrica, which this year plans its third edition. “In times of uncertainty we need to activate thought. We need a meeting point, a place for dialogue and listening. We need a Festival of Ideas,” reads the festival’s presentation text. The original venue is the Círculo headquarters, but there is also a street-level space in Plaza de España, which, until today, bore the name of Allianz. In its program, the festival announces activities at the Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Museum, the Thyssen Museum, the Ortega Marañón Foundation, the Ateneo de Madrid, the Telefónica Foundation, and CaixaForum. Zadie Smith, Edouard Louis, Remedios Zafra, and Eugenia Tenembaum are other guests at the Festival.
