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

The Long Road Back: Spain’s Popular Party (PP) — Part 2

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8 The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid's commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Union has ever suffered, larger than Paris or London, and yet curiously less fixed in the international memory. We try to hold two things at once here: the human tragedy of 11M, mourned every year much as the United States mourns its own September date, and the political rupture that followed it.  In 72 hours an electorate that was set to re-elect a government turned and removed it. How much of that swing was authentic moral revulsion at a governing party that had first blamed ETA, and how much was a coordinated campaign to pin the dead of Atocha on Aznar's alignment with Washington, is the question we sit with rather than resolve. What is not in dispute is that the left learned something that morning about the uses of the streets, and that the school of Zapatero was founded in those three days. From there the episode becomes, in large part, an extended meditation on a single man and a single temperament. Mariano Rajoy governed the Spanish right for fourteen years, from the shock of 2004 to the no-confidence vote of 2018, and we make the case that his defining gift and his defining flaw were the same thing: a genius for staying still. He won the largest victory in the party's history in 2011, one hundred and eighty-six seats, and yet that triumph rested on a collapsed Socialist government and twenty-five per cent unemployment rather than on any positive enthusiasm for him. The "technocrat" label, which in English flatters and in Spanish insults, captures the puzzle. We trace the ideological inconsistencies that hollowed out the party's credibility: opposition to same-sex marriage later quietly abandoned, a Historical Memory Law denounced in opposition and never repealed in power, tax cuts promised and thirty tax rises delivered. Whatever one's own position on each issue, the pattern corrodes trust, and trust, once spent, does not return. The Catalan crisis of 2017 is where we locate the real fracture. Faced with an illegal referendum staged with plastic ballot boxes, Rajoy reached for the judges and reached for Article 155 of the Constitution only after the fact, when the political moment had passed. It fell to King Felipe VI to give what was effectively a political speech, and to the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not the prime minister, to headline the great unity rally in the streets of Barcelona. Separatism has fallen since, but the lesson voters drew about their own government's passivity proved expensive. We argue this is the moment the big tent that Fraga built and Aznar perfected began to come apart, scattering its classical-liberal and conservative occupants toward Ciudadanos and Vox. The final part of the episode is a study in self-inflicted wounds. The Gürtel corruption affair was real but local, and the party's failure to defend the figures later acquitted of every charge.  Then came Pablo Casado, young, articulate, genuinely a man of ideas, who destroyed himself in 2022 by moving against Isabel Díaz Ayuso over allegations we find, having seen the dossier, remarkably thin. Which leaves the strangest fact in Spanish politics today, and the one we keep circling: the most popular figure on the Spanish right does not lead it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the overly-cautious Galician brought in as the adult in the room, has stabilised the party and brokered an uneasy coexistence with Vox, but excites no one. Ayuso, who may simply not want the job for reasons that are as much personal as strategic, remains the star.  We close on the party's own 2025 self-description, "centro reformista," a phrase that means precisely nothing, and on the road to 2027, where the only thing certain is that voters will be excitedly embracing PP but unambiguously signaling no more Sánchez. Next in the series: Vox. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]

Venezuela, Russia… Spain? Sovereign Immunity, Alter Egos & the Hunt for Assets

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/fan_mail/new] There is a tidy story we tell ourselves about who pays their debts. Rogue regimes and resource-rich autocracies default; mature European democracies, embedded in the rule of law and dependent on the confidence of the markets, do not. This episode is about what happens when that story breaks — when Spain, facing a wave of international arbitration awards arising from the retroactive cancellation of its clean-energy incentives, decides it would rather not pay, and finds itself the subject of frozen bank accounts and seized buildings across Europe. Our guest, Ashley Messick, has spent fifteen years in the unusual profession that exists precisely for this moment. She is the person investors, law firms, and corporations call when a state goes rogue: when an arbitral award has been won and the debtor simply refuses to honor it. Her work sits at the intersection of law, private intelligence, and political risk — asset tracing, cross-border enforcement, and the patient, adversarial craft of forcing a sovereign to the negotiating table. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2449694/support]

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]