Somewhere / Anywhere

The Origins of Spain's Popular Party (PP) — Part 1

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 1 of 8 Why does Spain's Partido Popular speak so many different political dialects at once — Madrid's free-market libertarianism, Galicia's institutional conservatism, the Christian democracy of its old guard — and yet remain the largest political party in Europe? In this opening installment of a new series on Spanish democracy, Diego and Rasheed argue that the answer lies not in incoherence but in DNA: PP is, and has always been, a coalition wearing the clothes of a party. The conversation moves from the death of Franco in 1975 through the engineered transition under King Juan Carlos, the founding of Alianza Popular by the formidable and unelectable Manuel Fraga, the collapse of the centrist UCD, the failed "Roca Operation" through which Catalan economic elites tried to manufacture an alternative center-right, and finally the 1989 Sevilla congress where Fraga surrendered the stage to a then-obscure regional president named José María Aznar. Along the way: why a brilliant Francoist minister who helped draft the 1978 Constitution could never win a national election; how Margaret Thatcher personally berated Fraga over Spain's vote on NATO; why the "Clan de Valladolid" outmaneuvered Fraga's preferred successor, the glamorous Isabel Tocino, in a weekend confrontation at his Galician fishing house; and the case for Aznar as perhaps the most consequential pro-liberty Western leader of the late twentieth century outside Reagan and Thatcher. Threaded through the narrative is a quieter argument about democratic self-restraint — Franco's regime dissolving itself into a constitutional monarchy, Fraga stepping aside despite holding the party in his hand, Aznar imposing his own two-term limit at the peak of his power and keeping the promise — set against the unraveling of those unwritten rules in contemporary Spanish politics. Part I closes on the eve of the 2004 election, with PP at its absolute majority and Mariano Rajoy chosen as Aznar's successor by a finger pointed across the cabinet table. Part II picks up with what happened three days before the vote. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]

Percival Manglano on Madrid, Power, and the Courage to Reform

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] Percival Manglano is one of the most underrated operators in modern Spanish politics. As Minister of Economy and Finance for the Community of Madrid, he passed three budgets in a single year, cut spending into the teeth of the worst recession since the Civil War, and shepherded the libertad de horarios law - that ended state control over shop opening hours in Madrid and which no other Spanish region has yet dared to copy.  Before that, he helped design Madrid's approach to immigration during the great wave of the early 2000s. After that, he served as a councilor in opposition to Manuela Carmena's communist administration, and later as a member of the Spanish Congress.  We wanted to talk to him because the Madrid model is one of the most interesting natural experiments in contemporary European governance, and because Percival is one of the people who actually built it.  Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]

Pedro Schwartz: A Life in Spanish Liberal Thought | The Scars of Freedom

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] In this episode of Somewhere, Anywhere, we step outside the studio and into the home of one of Europe’s most important classical liberal thinkers: Pedro Schwartz. What follows is less an interview than a conversation across generations about freedom, institutions, and the intellectual life of modern Spain. Schwartz’s life traces the arc of European liberalism in the twentieth century. As a young Spaniard coming of age under Franco, he left a closed country and found himself at the London School of Economics, studying under Karl Popper and alongside some of the great figures of modern economic thought. Those formative years exposed him to a cosmopolitan intellectual environment that would shape his lifelong project: bringing the traditions of classical liberalism —Popper, Hayek, Friedman, Robbins — into Spanish intellectual and political life.  Over the decades, Schwartz became not only a scholar but also a conduit of ideas. He translated, introduced, and debated liberal thought in Spain when it was still intellectually marginal. His influence extends through generations of economists, journalists, and policymakers, many of whom first encountered liberal ideas through his seminars, essays, and public interventions.  The conversation moves fluidly between intellectual history and lived politics. Schwartz reflects on the intellectual atmosphere of the LSE in the 1960s, the role of the School of Salamanca in Spain’s liberal tradition, and his encounters with figures such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. At the same time, we revisit decisive moments in modern Spanish history: the democratic transition, the 1981 coup attempt, Spain’s entry into NATO and the European project, and the reformist wave of the 1990s.  Schwartz also speaks candidly about his own brief experience in politics —founding a liberal party, serving in parliament, and influencing the policy debates that helped shape Spain’s market reforms. Yet he ultimately returns to the role he values most: that of the public intellectual who helps societies clarify their principles. Throughout the episode, one theme recurs: liberalism is not simply a set of policy preferences but a civilizational inheritance. It requires institutions, intellectual seriousness, and a broad cultural horizon — one that ranges from economic theory to philosophy, history, and literature. At 91 years old, Pedro Schwartz remains engaged in that project. This conversation is both a reflection on a remarkable intellectual life and a meditation on the enduring challenges of defending freedom in democratic societies. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]

How Spain Is Actually Governed: The Administrative State, Autonomous Communities & Power

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Esperanza Aguirre on Governing Madrid

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] Madrid didn’t become “Madrid” by accident. The late nights, the density, the sense that the city is competing for talent rather than managing decline. In this episode, Diego and I sit down with Esperanza Aguirre, former President of the Community of Madrid, and treat her not as a personality but as a case study: what happens when a politician is a seriousdefender of classical liberalism and then gets enough power to try implementing it. Aguirre’s liberalism isn’t a retrospective brand. She traces it to a specific intellectual and institutional pipeline: the Liberal Club of Madrid under Pedro Schwartz, weekly immersion in The Economist when it was more explicitly liberal, and Hayek’s argument about the Industrial Revolution’s brutal optics but longer-run moral arithmetic. She even gives a wonderfully concrete “de-programming” moment: a 1979 trip where seeing telecom competition in the U.S. made the “natural monopoly” story feel less like economics and more like Spanish administrative instinct. From there, Madrid becomes the application layer. Her version of liberalism is not just lower taxes, but choice plus speed. Choice in schooling and in health care, where she describes making it normal to pick schools, hospitals, doctors, and specialists, and bluntly frames the political resistance as a preference for “captive clients.” Speed in how a city allows people to build and open: she explains the pivot from slow, permission-first licensing to declaración responsable, an ex post enforcement model that lets small businesses start operating without waiting a year or two for a stamp. Layer in the other pieces: hospitals built quickly by giving land and contracting private construction and sometimes operation, with reversion later; an aggressive metro expansion; and finally liberalized opening hours and Sundays, turning Madrid into the “always open” city tourists now take for granted. If you think “classical liberalism” is too abstract for real politics, Aguirre makes it concrete: it’s a set of institutional defaults about who gets to decide, how fast they’re allowed to act, and whether the public sector can be made to behave as if citizens are customers rather than assignments. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]