The spectacle Madrid

Madrid is, increasingly, a continuous and terrible spectacle, starring a wide collection of actors from all imaginable professions who always move around a single concept: power. In its full dimension and with all the elements that have characterized the work for centuries: ambition, corruption, exploitation, manipulation... institutional violence if necessary. Pasqual Maragall already anticipated it in detail in articles in El País 25 years ago ("Madrid se va") and 23 years ago ("Madrid se ha ido"). Today we note that these are not only very relevant reflections, but that it is possible and necessary to update them.

Let's start by recognizing the corresponding authorship. Felipe González, first, and José María Aznar afterwards are the authentic scriptwriters and directors of the great Madrid that we live, know, and suffer today. Spain, after the democratic transition, was to become one of the great states of Europe, and to achieve this it had to have a great capital that would assume the necessary economic and political leadership, overcoming the "obsolete" temptations of a federal Spain with several capitals and real plurinationality. The internal question resolved, apparently, by means of the café para todos, the real objective remained: to make Madrid the great central nucleus of power, the symbol of the new Spain, a principal member of the EU and NATO, the global Hispanic capital, the great economic hub of Southern Europe.

The success of the operation has been total. Madrid is defined today by a double concentration of power that is relatively unusual in today's global world: the active complicity between the two poles of power, the private economic and the public institutional. Madrid market and Madrid state are the two great scenarios of historical change but also of consolidation, mutual dependence, and active conspiracy.

The evolution of Madrid's GDP in relation to that of the State is spectacular. It has gone from 15% to almost 20% in just over 30 years, to the detriment of the relative weight of the rest of the autonomous communities, with the exception of Catalonia (19%) and Euskadi (6%), which maintain their weight. Data on foreign investment, employment, and sectoral growth confirm the undeniable strength of Madrid understood as a large metropolitan region. An economic and social space that, de facto, includes the two Castilles and, in part, Valencia, Aragon, Andalusia, and Extremadura, communities all captivated by the efficiency of the radial infrastructures conceived precisely for this purpose. This process has generated the numerous demographics needed to sustain the new economy: hospitality and personal services, industry, healthcare, innovation, various technologies, consulting, legal and financial services, investment, and real estate management...

On the other hand, the old state that emerged intact from Francoism has managed to adapt to democracy and globalization, to modernize itself, without losing an iota of its corporate, centralist, and structurally conservative character. On the contrary, it has done so by gaining in power, efficiency, capacity for intervention, and control. This institutional conglomerate is also, obviously, a social and, therefore, electoral conglomerate. A body of millions of men and women with completely describable belonging and roots, with ramifications throughout the State and measured in personal interests as much as, or more than, in ideology. State bodies, monarchy, major cultural institutions, judicial hierarchies, land, sea, and air armies, large public companies, economic and institutional control bodies, and, naturally, the immense bulk of civil servants at all levels of the three public administrations located in Madrid territory. We therefore have the complete sociology that today constitutes the triple concept of Madrid city, Madrid capital of the state, and Madrid large metropolitan region, a black hole of Spains and a great South European and Latin American metropolis.

It is easy to speak of Madrid DF as a synthesis and concentrated expression of greatness and power in the image of Mexico and other capitals. But the idea is, to say the least, grotesque. Federal and Madrid are concepts, for the moment, openly antagonistic.

The relevant element of this whole panorama, in any case, is the politico-economic emergence of this social and institutional structure. A gradual emergence over the last 30 years, resulting from the sum of forces from both fields, market and state, transformed into an active alliance in the service of shared interests. It is this obscene proximity between economic power and public interest that has given rise to the spectacle of systemic corruption that the Madrid media broadcast daily and at length. We are facing a phenomenon of collusion of power, rooted and emerged from the very socioeconomic structures, which has transcended the natural risk of individual error in democracy to become a permanent and stable feature of a very specific reality.

Madrid is today a conservative society, mostly settled in reactionary positions and tied to the interests of great private economic power. Socialism governs Spain from Madrid but despite Madrid and against Madrid. It does so hand in hand with national left-wing parties (and bourgeoisies), but without trying to represent the alternative Spain (plurinational and federally solidarity-based) that could be the only real antidote to the power concentrated in Madrid.

This is the double incoherence that is about to send the PSOE to the catacombs of opposition for many years: it has not managed to avoid being dragged into the same corrupt practices of the current Madrid and, at the same time, it is the object of intense and personal persecution by the powerful public and private agents of the same Madrid establishment.

Finally, after noting how González and Aznar continue to jointly watch over the continuity of their "Spain-Madrid", we will have to know how to answer a triple question:

Do Catalan and Spanish socialism have the spirit and leadership necessary to break with the dynamic that drags them to disaster?

Do we progressives and democrats from all over the State, including naturally those from Madrid, have the will and the capacity to build the alliance and offer the alternative country project that we know is possible?

Can we begin to talk openly about the nations and peoples that make up the State, their rights, and the reforms required to update the Constitution and the State's apparatuses?