Andrés Villena: "The Indra case tells us that the government does not want the same thing to happen to it as to Zapatero"

Andrés Villena (Elx, 1980) has spent years investigating business lobbies, family sagas, banks, and institutions to be able to x-ray the structure and functioning of the Spanish elite. The result is Las élites que dominan España,a book that was to be published by Planeta, which finally backed out, and has ended up being published by Libros del K.O. 

You say they ghosted you...

— I worked 14 months with Planeta, they told me I could be a bomb, that I would be one of the bets for 2026. And from one day to the next, suddenly, the messages disappeared. Yes, it's ghosting. If the thesis of the book is the persistence of autocratic or authoritarian ways and the flagship media more or less of this period rejects the book at the last minute, perhaps it could be interpreted as a certain ratification of what the book explains.

What is elite?

— Do you know it comes from the word chosen? I think it has religious and mystical meaning. “We are the chosen ones and we are for something”. The elite is a small group that has what the left often lacks: class consciousness. 

The Spanish elite is formed in '49 or '59?

— In the Civil War there is a reward of favors with the winners of the war, and a reconfiguration of banking, monarchist groups, etc. In 1959 we have a key renewal that goes from Spanish neofascism to pro-American technocracy. And that model, unlike 1939, arrives today in many aspects. 

You say that '59 is the birth of a new common sense.

— Franco had won the war, but not peace. And there is a series of young people –Ramon Tamames, Fernando Sánchez Dragó– who had been born into victorious families, but they rebel against their parents. The regime sees that the myth of the war does not justify an autarkic, backward, and externally closed Spain. They understand that the system must be shaken up, and this is done with the financial and military support of the United States. Here begins the push for tourism and a series of ministers are changed so that those we call technocrats, who say they have no ideology nor understand class struggle, can arrive.

Who were they?

— A Barcelonian named Laureano López Rodó, who had been a member of the Falange; other technocrats who were diffusely part of Opus Dei. They are the ones who look to Washington and see that there is business and that opening the country is interesting. And people will buy into that common sense, because instead of hunger, they will have the seed of what will be the middle class.

“In Barcelona, around places like the Boccaccio nightclub, the gauche divine was born. A group of intellectuals and artists intertwined with the local bourgeoisie at the forefront of a cultural transformation process. This change gave rise to new publishing houses, painters, photographers, filmmakers, men and women of letters. This cultural pressure represented another new opposition, a critical mobilization with which the autocracy was forced to coexist. A part of the Madrid divine left organized itself at La Dehesilla”.

— The dictatorship did not expect this. Washington's anticommunist manual stated that with capitalism, per capita income rose and people voted for their rulers if there were elections. But here, dissatisfaction grew as per capita income increased. And the Catalan and Madrid cultural elite wanted to turn Spain into Europe. It was not a revolution, it was an ambitious change to move forward that would be completed in the 80s.

What is La Dehesilla?

— A property that belonged to a republican minister, Justino de Azcárate. Many people who would later populate the history of Spain visited him: Miguel Boyer, Mariano Rubio, Ramón Tamames, the Garrigues Walker brothers. They were as anti-Franco as they were anti-communist. They are what will later be known as the beautiful people, the business front behind the economic transition.

Can the left also be elite?

— Of course, Lenin during the Russian Revolution speaks of the revolutionary vanguard and the party that must lead the revolution. In this case, state elite. 

But perhaps, due to the Francoist past, the elite in Spain has traditionally been right-wing.

— We have to tread carefully. It is true that Boyer or Solchaga come from families that were not Francoist, but in a Francoist state, those who are ministers after the regime have been trained in Francoist universities and have socialized in organizations that operated during the same period. It is easy to inherit many of their cliques.

The elite is also explained by privatizations. What did those pushed forward by PSOE and PP mean?

— They are lies. When you analyze the results, there have been no lower prices, there has been no liberalization. You realize that most of the intellectuals who justified it ended up on the boards of privatized companies, many promoters of privatizations have remained in these companies or others similar. Therefore, more than a privatization, it is a process of clientelistic capitalism. I am the one who governs, I sell packages of public companies to banks, I have someone there, be it at Cajamadrid or La Caixa, and these networks are what persist. That is why in the end what we have is the privatization of clientelism. 

There is a power that resides in having people close to certain companies. What does the Indra case tell us?

— That the current government does not want what happened to Zapatero to happen to him, who had an ambitious social program, but did not know what to do in the economic sphere because the PP controlled all the large companies. Sánchez is being aggressive, I don't know if on the advice of Zapatero himself.

In the book you say: Zapatero realized that he had to try to recover the privatized public apparatus, not to nationalize it, but to ingratiate himself with this new business elite. What was wrong with Zapatero with the elite?

— That nobody managed to place. He tries it at BBVA and suddenly the Windsor building catches fire. He tries to place someone at Endesa and there is a takeover bid that ended like a civil war. Aznar had closed the corporate network well, but Zapatero knew how to win in another aspect: the media and cultural one. He moved with Mediapro, these are the years when La Sexta and Cuatro were born, and a media elite that was indeed key for him to win the second election.

And what does Sánchez do now?

— It is being much more aggressive. He has taken advantage of the Saudi Fund's entry into Telefónica to arrive with 10%, place the president, and put an end to a 30-year era of Popular Party dominance. That's no small feat. The changes at Movistar are significant. The entry into Indra is already at 28%; this implies many internal operations. And putting Àngel Simón in charge is touching a bourgeoisie of high executives. I would say he is putting all his eggs in one basket. 

Does the business elite appoint and dismiss ministers? Can it say: no important portfolio for Podemos?

— And not only with left-wing governments. Suárez, Cifuentes, Casado... they all received a warning. Adolfo Suárez is buried with a motion of no confidence, but he is brought down by the same bourgeoisie that had enthroned him because he had believed too much in the idea of democratizing Spain. Or Cristina Cifuentes, who saw that there were excesses in certain contracts, denied a university to the Planeta group...

It is said that there were conflicts with the Chiron group.

— And suddenly images of her stealing come out, as revenge. Or Pablo Casado, who came out to say that Díaz Ayuso, at the worst moment of the pandemic, was awarding arbitrary contracts and favoring close people. There was a shake-up and she disappears. I think when elites cross the line in reformist work, they receive a warning. But Casado has had a good professional exit. 

Oh, really?

— He works for an investment fund, not eating pipes in a bank. One way to execute is to give a good job. You can't sink him because he could explain things. 

Vox is elite?

— It's the pornographic part. The one that shows everything in short, close-up shots. When what is erotic finishes its function, the pornographic thing can arrive. 

But they present themselves almost as anti-system.

— Abascal was a person very close to Esperanza Aguirre, and the best funding for Denaes, the Foundation for the Defense of the Nation, where he was, receives important funding from the Community of Madrid, which is where Spanish polarization is born, financed with regional funds, and part of the Catalan process.

The Catalan process?

— Maragall published an article in 2002 titled Madrid is leaving. Francisco Álvarez Cascos has drawn a radial map so that all important cities in Spain are two hours from Madrid. What is more nationalist than that? The Madrid institutional vacuum cleaner accelerated at the beginning of 2000, and this has consequences.

In the book you talk about the Basque and Catalan bourgeoisies. Are there no other bourgeoisies in Spain?

— Yes, but from an industrial point of view, they were the great supporters of the Francoist era. They had lower unemployment levels and received a certain compensatory industrialization, because they also had to be convinced in this way.

The idea that “Spain needs to be periodically saved and rescued from its inner demons” is an idea from the elite?

— A fundamental characteristic of elites is the fear of losing what they have. They must not only have money, but also maintain reason. We are surrounded by control mechanisms and calls to order, like when they say that Spain is breaking apart. It is a call not to trust ourselves too much, because we are not capable of governing ourselves.

How is a discourse constructed that makes domination acceptable?

— With stabilization plans you can claim economic results. With the Constitution, peace, you can also sell the idea of Spain of '92, with Seville and Barcelona, and the idea of being a gateway to Europe. These are successes that can convince us that it is the least bad of all possible worlds. But perhaps when we analyze what we have lost or the things we have not been able to decide, we realize that the official story weighs heavily.

Senior officials are another elite where many surnames are repeated.

— If your father is a diplomat, you have been to four different schools as a child and speak three languages, you already have different expectations. And in a competitive exam with 10 or 12 places a year, in which you have to study 6 to 10 hours... not everyone has access to it. This creates social abstraction. And high civil service in Spain is a way to penetrate the private sector. When you have the surname De Guindos, you can see the public sphere as a springboard to success, because you become a moderately meritocratic state nobility. And the public period is preparation for jumping into a private sector where you will be welcomed for your talent, but also for your relationships and information.

The elite study in the same places, move in similar circles and also marry among themselves.

— The mayor of Madrid has married an Urquijo. I'm sure they loved each other very much, but it also means that the Martínez Almeida institution, close to Joan of Bourbon, the father of Joan Carlos I, has another link with the Urquijos. These marriages, with a bit of love, are fantastic for maintaining all sorts of agreements and predictability. 

For weddings and elite… the Boyer-Preyslers.

— It was incredible because it was 1988, and there was just a UGT strike. Boyer's wedding was a symptom of the divorce with the sister union. And the photo that the PSOE, with professionalization, was closer to businessmen, financiers and institutions of the future European Community. The house they bought is known as Villa Meona: it had 17 bathrooms.  

What do we do with this elite if we want a democratic country?

— Understand it better. And understand that the fortunes they have, nor the names and surnames, are not as important as the structure. Understand how they relate to each other, what role cohesion plays and what role the influence groups that oppose them or want to negotiate with them with ambition to demand more from them should play. And I believe that the key is division and a problem of representativeness in groups that are anti-elite, but which are more divided than the elites themselves among themselves. And also understand that many times they believe their role and make reforms that are good and that we need leadership.