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

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. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hi Diego, and we are back with another episode.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Glad to be here, Rashid, and we have uh an amazing guest for today's episode. So uh very excited to have this discussion with him talking about Percival Manglano. So, how did you learn about Percival?

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Of course, for you.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Well, how did I describe him?

SPEAKER_02 0:38

You describe him as a key operator for actually implementing many of these policies that we pretty much call the Madrid model, more or less, over the last many, many episodes. And one of the things that came up when we did the Esperanza Aguilar episode with the listeners, they're like, okay, but can we get some more details? It's like you think you go wonk an episode and then he asked more. Yes. So Diego's like, oh, I know the perfect person to actually get to those details.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

And to all our great listeners who always want a little bit more detail now, we're going to tell you how the sausage is made because our great guest here, like I said, Percival Manglano, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

It's good to be received as a sausage maker. Thank you. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

So uh Percival, uh, tell us a little bit about your background, because you I I believe you you studied in international relations. Uh so can you share your even just go back to your childhood and your family memories? Because this is kind of a biographical episode, too. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Uh well, uh, first of all, thank you for having me here. So my name is Percival Mangano, that's a very English name for a Spaniard. Both my parents are from Valencia, so they're both Spanish, but I was born in London, and they decided that they wanted an English name for their child. Uh, this is 1972 when I was born, and so they gave me Percival, which, as everybody knows, comes from the Arthurian legend. So Sir Percival found the Holy Grail, and as the ironies go, there's a Holy Grail in the Cathedral of Valencia. So everything seems to be well connected. So I was born in London. We lived very few months in London. We came back to Spain, and then I went to an English school here in Madrid. So thanks to my parents, I speak decent English. And then from 1990 until 2000, I lived abroad. I went to university in France, I did a master's degree in international relations and international economics in the US, Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. And then I was 25 years old and I decided I wanted adventure. And so I got a one-way ticket to Indonesia. This was July 1998. People will probably remember it was the time of the financial crisis in Southeast Asia. Uh Suharto, the long-term dictator in Indonesia, had stepped down in May, if I remember correctly, of 1998. And I arrived in 98, in June of 1998. July, actually, July of 1998. So that was quite an adventure. I enjoyed Indonesia very much. I was there for a year and a half, and then in 2000, I returned to Spain, decided to go into politics, and since then I've been a politician for some time, and I've been a lawyer. I also became a lawyer. This is a theme that will probably come up during the interview, but I started sort of in the international relations scene, you know, big ideas, the world order, so on and so forth. And as I got older, I decided that it's much more interesting to go to concrete issues. It's not about redoing the world order, it's about helping a person who has a problem and solving his problem or her problem. I became a lawyer. So basically, in the last 25 years, I've been a politician and I've been a lawyer.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Would it be okay to say you were a chef and now a sausage maker? I do realize one thing which is interesting, which is you did not experience firsthand some of the more transformative years of the Spanish economy under Aznar. You were actually in Southeast Asia. Correct. How do you remember that? Because many of your ideas had never been implemented in the 70s or in the 80s or in the early 90s, and here you are starting to move towards free markets, open societies, but you're oceans apart.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

I I was never a very activist student. I never decided I'd go into politics probably until I was in Indonesia. You know, I'm one of these liberals who was a liberal before he realized he was a liberal. I think this is pretty common, that you have an instinct for liberalism before you actually realize that instinct has been thought about and written about uh for hundreds of years. I studied, I went to live in Indonesia. This was a country that had come out of poverty for the last 30 years, who Harto was a dictator, of course. Economically, it had done well until the crisis in 1998, and it was rebuilding itself. And what I was most struck about in my time in Indonesia was this transition to a democracy. We had that in Spain in the 1970s. Of course, I didn't live it because I was too young, but in Indonesia I did live it, but I couldn't participate since I was a foreigner. And that's probably when I became interested in politics, how to build a democracy, the interplay of parties, of ideas, of initiatives. And when I returned to Spain in 2000, it was with the idea of being part of a political movement. I arrived in 2000 in July, if I remember correctly. And in February, I went to Partido Popular office and I said, hi, I'd like to become part of Partido Popular, and I've been there ever since. So that's 26 years.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

One second before we continue. The Partido Popular, the Popular Party, was the only option for anyone on the center right at this point. It was a unified political front. Since then, it was once split in free because a moderate party, Ciudadanos, came up, and a more radical right-wing party came up. Now Ciudanos is gone, but that more radical party, Vox, is still around and is quite a strong companion to PP these days. But of course, Percival did not have much to choose. There was one shop he could go to. Now he's remaining that shop, so he's obviously comfortable in it. But my point is you come to Spain in the early 21st century, the political map of the center right is uh homogeneous.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

It's curious how you mention it, Indonesia. So my early 20s, I also spent in Southeast Asia. I lived in Manila for the Philippines, okay, for a few years. And that's where I also started to think a lot more about actual policies and politics that are going to make a nation. Because also you can see the growth happening in front of your eyes, where my home country, Barbados, a small Caribbean island, you don't really see much happening in front of you. So therefore, the Philippines and Southeast Asia really really realize and think about much more how does it happen? So it's very interesting. You mentioned Indonesia was a kind of almost like an awakening, it sounds like for you. But I'm still trying to pinpoint what exactly was it that the Indonesia expert you mentioned, the transition period, the democracy period. But do you have like a more specific thing that really pushed you to say, I want to get involved?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

It's hard to find one experience as such. I was 27 years old. One of my perhaps things that I should have done better in life is to have a clearer idea of what I wanted to be when I was older. So I sort of I during my 20s, I'm always amazed at people who are 23 and they know exactly what they want to be. No, and and I don't know, they become a lawyer or they become an investment banker or a consultant or whatever, an academic. I never had that. I was interested by a lot of different things, of a lot of experiences. I I was attracted to Indonesia because of the experience of living on the other side of the world, you know, being 25 years old and not having to worry about other things.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

Well, why Indonesia? There are many other options you could have chosen. I'd been there on holiday.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

I'd been there in 1993, I think. Southeast Asia at the time was a very strong emerging region in the world. You could feel the energy, you could feel things happening. I'm sure in uh you had the same feeling in the Philippines. You could feel things were dynamic, and I was attracted to that energy. It was also a tough experience. Just to give you an anecdote. So at the beginning of Indonesia, I worked in the Jakarta Stock Exchange. I was working there for a few months, and there were a lot of demonstrations because the new order in Indonesia was being worked on, and so there were demonstrations all the time. So one day, instead of being able to take a bus, I had to walk because the main avenue in Jakarta was closed. And so I started walking, and there was this huge demonstration, and there were policemen in front, and they were sort of looking at each other, waiting for something to happen. And I just stayed there. I was just curious, and I talked to the demonstrators, and I talked to the policemen. Everybody would talk to what they say in Indonesia, a bule, sort of a white guy who doesn't really belong, but he's just there, and they they were sort of sympathetic to him. And Indonesian, by the way, is a very easy language to learn. Yeah, the Bahasa. Do you speak Bahasa? I used to. You know, it's not much room to practice. Exactly. My Spanish political experience hadn't helped my Bahasa. And then suddenly everything changed. Someone had a whistle, and the police confronted the demonstrators and they started shooting at them. I mean, and I was amazed. So I kept behind and I walked behind and I started picking up bullets. I have some of the bullets from the time as well. So it was a tough experience. Uh later I found out that a number of people had been killed. Indonesia was finding a way of dealing with democratic demonstrations, which they had never done before, until now, if you had a demonstration, the police shot at them. And that was probably the last time that happened. It was the last time that peaceful demonstrations were confronted with violence. I was uh a witness to that. And uh, if you end up a liberal, violence is a very important uh part of what you are against, no? The the exercise of violence against uh demonstrators. I think that that probably influenced my thinking. Why did they have to shoot the demonstrators? I mean, they weren't uh being particularly aggressive, but it was part of the transition in Indonesia. And I think any self-conscious liberal is anti-violence. Socialism is by definition the violent ideology. We believe in peaceful cooperation. So perhaps that influenced as well my thinking.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

But by the way, if Percival's career, if we just pick someone by random and we ask about Percival, they will think economics. So that's that's interesting because as you see, your political awakening has not much to do with economics per se. No, your career is more linked to the legal world and your big book, your manifesto, which we will talk about, which we can translate as stepping in puddles, uh, right? Pisando charcos, is essentially about democratization of political life. So, yes, we will talk about economics. Yes, you were a key part of the Madrid economic model, but it's uh it's very uh interesting to know that there is all of this depth to your journey in liberalism, and also let's keep in mind, and we'll talk about that as well. You were one of the key opposition leaders to a communist mayor in Madrid where uh open violence were openly defended from the mayor's office. So we'll get to that. But I see a line, I see a connection from what you experienced there in Jakarta. But I didn't imagine the anecdote was going to take such a dark turn. It seemed like a but I see how that interests.

SPEAKER_02 11:54

That seems to be a common tread that I realized that the Madrid liberals, the law part, you know, very Hayekian side of economic liberalism rather than let's say freedman side of modeling. And Esperanza Ivo Pedro, for example, that same kind of uh thread line with the legal aspect that restrained the government. But I wanted to, before we just leave Indonesia, that take a bit here so long, but so a lot of our listeners are actually British and Irish. And you mentioned that you actually met Rory Stewart. Of all the people to meet while in Indonesia 30 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Okay, well that that's an interesting anecdote as well. So as I said, I'd done my graduate school in Washington, DC. And uh one of the people I went to graduate school with was a man called Felix Martin, who has become a sort of an interesting intellectual in Britain. He's written a book about uh currencies, about the history of currency, and he went to university with Rory Stewart. And so I was in Jakarta. Felix knew I was in Jakarta, and he sent me an email and he said, Look, I think you should meet this uh this person. He's a diplomat who's stationed in the British Embassy in Jakarta. Why don't you meet? And I said, Sure, you know, I didn't know anybody in Jakarta when I arrived. So I thought, sure, you know, it would be great to meet him. He invited me to his home, and I was sitting at the entrance, and then this extremely young-looking man comes to greet me, and I thought, this must be his youngest brother or something, no, because he seemed to be 15 years old. But no, it was Rory, you know, he was young, but he looked even younger. I know he I was 25, he must have been the same, 24 or 25. We became friends. He's a very engaging personality, very smart, very bright, very fun, has a sense of humor. During the dinners, he kept on saying, Yeah, I don't like being a diplomat. This is boring. What I want to do is to walk from Turkey to Vietnam. Really, what I want to do in life. And I thought, yeah, whatever. I didn't really believe him. You know, he had a very luxurious life. He had a nice car, he had a very beautiful girlfriend. I thought he was gonna give this up to walk across the continent. And sure enough, he did. He he decided to give up his post in Jakarta and he went to Turkey and he started walking. And when he arrived in Afghanistan, walking from Turkey, it's when 11th September 2001, and he stayed in Jakarta because the operation of the US against Afghanistan started. And out of that came this very interesting book. Let me see if I remember the title now, and now it's gone. I'll remember it later. But that's the first book he he wrote on his experience in Afghanistan, in between places, I think it's called. It's a fascinating book. So I followed his career since then. You know, and then he went into politics, he was an MP, and now he has this very famous uh podcast which has gone very well for him. No, him and Alistair Campbell. And they recently interviewed Pedro Sánchez here in Spain, our prime minister. And you know, I watched the interview and I thought, this is terrible, because they're so condescendent and they're so awed by Pedro Sánchez just because he's shown an opposition to Trump. And so I WhatsApp Rory and I said, I really don't agree. I was I was polite, huh? I wasn't very um and I saw you know, I thought, you know, I maybe you could have been more uh aggressive in your in your questions about his corruption problems and so on. But uh comes to show that experts, international expertise, what comes to mind as someone who knows a lot about things, when you come to concrete examples of concrete issues, show that they don't know what they're talking about. This is part of my intellectual journey, thank you, journey. I've come to realize that we know very little about almost everything. And you have to be very humble when you reach conclusions and when you analyze things. The fatal conceit Hayek talked about is absolutely true. Socialists and not only socialists tend to think they know everything about everything. We know very little about almost everything, and you have to be very careful with what you say and what you analyze, because most of the time there's a lot of people who know much more about what you're trying to say than you do. And often, if you don't know what you're doing, you play another person's political game, which is exactly what I thought happened with Rory's interview with Pedro Sánchez. They just went straight into Pedro Sánchez's political game of elevating his international profile because he's having so much trouble within Spain in his domestic politics.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Yeah, well, absolutely went for that trap. But many international outlets these days, just because obviously Trump's standing at the international level is feared by many governments. The fact that Pedro Sánchez is willing to speak out against Trump and just invoke these broad principles of international law whenever Trump goes on the aggressive on any particular front, seems to blindside people about who's really saying these things and what he's really doing to the country that he's governing, which is Spain. So listeners of our podcast obviously know what's really happening here. But in any case, so I think it's pretty clear the name of our podcast is somewhere, anywhere. I think Percival is pretty much an anywhere person. But then you come back to Spain, you come back to the motherland, and you knock on the door of the popular party. So I know that you were eventually you are involved in politics with the regional government in Madrid, but you prior to that you were involved with the Faez think tank, which was the ideas laboratory that Prime Minister José María Ana had set up in the 90s, and that since then became the hotspot for classic liberal thinking. I think that role right now is being fulfilled by Juan de Mariana Institute, but for a very long time, Faez was the place to be, and you were there.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Right. So when I arrived, you have to find something that some value added you can bring to politics. I'd been abroad for a long time. I didn't know a lot of people in politics, basically no one. What I had is the ability to write. I often think that in politics, politicians and even people who work on politics are divided between those who can write and those who don't. Get me this doesn't mean that there's a superiority of those who can write. Very often it's the other way around. It's the politicians who don't write who have the major responsibilities. But politicians who don't write do need people who write. So I could write and I started writing on international affairs. That was my specialty at the time. And so I started to make a name for myself, and I eventually I ended up in Fais, as you said. This was in 2004. I wasn't there for a long time, but it was right at the time when José María Aznar ended his career as prime minister. And so he arrived at Faiz, and FIS started to do this very important work they've done for a while. And from there, I went to the Spanish Congress. So I was only for six months in the Spanish Congress. I was an advisor for international affairs. That's what I did at the time. And I started to learn the ropes of internal work for a political party. What a political party needs. You need papers, you need people who think, you need people who who give ideas, you need people who write speeches. Speech writing is absolutely basic in any politician's career. You need people who discuss ideas. And fortunately at the time, there was a lot of that in the Spanish right. I think there still is. At the time, maybe I was younger and I was more impressed by it. But at the time, I was certainly impressed by the energy as well of this think tank uh uh initiatives, people uh giving their ideas of wanting to reform as well. In my case, my wanting to be in politics, my attraction to politics is reform. Basically, I've been attracted to this because there are things that I think should be changed. This is that's this can be very frustrating, of course, because politics is not necessarily about changing stuff. And when you want to change stuff and there's so much that doesn't change, you can get frustrated. But uh if you're satisfied by changing even a few things, that can be enough. So that was my initial journey in politics, no? Being able to give some value added by writing and thinking and sharing experience, and also with the idea of wanting to change certain things that I think are worth changing.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

What was the main idea engine in the party at that time? Was it still coming from like Fayette? Was it some meeting office in Congress? Where were the ideas centered?

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Partido Popular and Atnar had been in government for eight years. So when a party is in government, basically ideas come from the government. So the interesting uh thing of this time was that Partido Popular was leaving government and all the infrastructure they had developed to a large extent in the presidency of government, in what we call in Spain Moncloa. There was a big staff uh there in Moncloa under the chief of staff at the time, a lot of people thinking, a lot of people writing papers, a lot of people who worked with them.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

But by the way, this was Javier Fernandez Lasquete, who is a common name in almost every episode we do about the Madrid model, eventually we'll have him here on the hot seat, was one of the key advisors to Aznar. So there was there was a thing, such thing as a think tank inside the government. But as Pertival uh mentions, when he joins, all of this is gone because PP has lost power. So now I think.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

So now you have to rebuild from the opposition. No, you have to rebuild these idea working think tanks, idea building think tanks from the opposition. FIS had done that in the past. FIS is born at the beginning of the 90s, and so they had the experience of doing this. They had been absolutely key in working on the ideas for Partido Popular until 96, until arrives in government. And so it was natural for FIS to do the same thing once they were out of government again in Partido Popular. So this think tank was key. It was a pretty big think tank. In Spain, there isn't a big tradition of think tanks. I think On the right is one of the key ones. On their left, uh there's been a few F Nacional and and so on, but this one was pretty big. And I think since then uh think tanks have grown. There have been more of them. They've been able to uh fundraise uh in order to to build themselves. I think uh one of the keys in Spain about there not being a lot of uh think tanks is that there's a how can I say this? There's not a big tradition of fundraising. We are too used to being funded by the state, by public funds, and there's not a big tradition of uh raising private funds. But I think that has changed in the last 20 years. Even FIS went into private fundraising. I think they were key for other think tanks to to be born. Uh Juan de Mariana right now is absolutely key as one of these uh think tanks that has been able to be born uh to operate without public funding. I mean it's almost unheard of in Spain. So the basis for that I think was created at FIS. At the same time, it was a staff for uh José María Aznar, he has a very big international profile, so they they helped with that as well. But as I said, I wasn't there for long. I went to Congress uh in 2005, then in 2006 I went to the regional government to Madrid. So my experience, my direct experience with uh think tank long, that intense.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Esperanza Aguirre, who's been a guest here at the podcast, she becomes the governor of Madrid in 2003, and she had been the president of the Firez Foundation. This is a little known fact. She was the president of a think tank inside the Firez think tank, which was called Instituto de Ecologia y Mercado, Institute for Market Environmentalism. So that shows you that she was very much a vanguard because that sort of ideas start to resonate with everything on the center right these days, now that they've realized that all the climate debate has been monopolized by the left. But back 30 years ago, Esperanza Aguirre was already involved in that sort of ideas and debate. Jose Luis Moreno, who served with you as a member of Council in Madrid, was also a member of that thing. But yes, you joined the Madrid government and you eventually become finance minister, but that's not your first role there. So how do you get the call to join the Madrid government and what roles do you start to occupy? And how do you eventually get to the Minister of the United States?

SPEAKER_01 24:14

So, as I said, I was an advisor, Spanish Congress for international relations. Whom, by the way, who were the MPs you would work closely with? The head of foreign affairs at the time was Gustavo Aristegui. Oh, yeah. He was the the what we call the portavoz, the spokesperson for foreign affairs in the Partido Popular in 2004. But my boss, my direct boss, was a woman called Lucia Figaro. Oh. And she became a minister of education here in Madrid. At the beginning of immigration, uh very interesting, by the way. If you want to have a discussion now about immigration, I have strong ideas on that because of my experience at the time in Madrid. Part of the debates we're having now in Spain about the immigration and the regularization of immigration and so on, we had at the time in 2004-2005, because there was a very big process of regularization at the time as well. Madrid has been traditionally an open region, not only in economic aspects, but as well in immigration aspects. I mean, the only exception I can think of of a dynamic economy without immigration is Japan. Apart from Japan, every other country in the world that has been economically dynamic has had large immigration inflows. And Madrid, of course, is an example of this. So immigration started arriving in Spain end of 1999, beginning of the 2000s, especially from South America, from Ecuador, from Colombia, from Peru, from Bolivia.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

There was almost no migration to Spain until this point. Very little. This is very remarkable. If you check the 80s and all the way up to the late 90s, there is very little migration to Spain. This seems mind-blowing to think now.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

In 1990, it was less than 2% of population foreign-born, and now it is 23%.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

And I don't have the number for the early 21st century, but I'm positive it wasn't even 4 or 5%. It was extremely low. And when it started coming was, by the way, Aznar. Aznar years, growth, opportunity, then Spain becomes attractive. And Madrid government policies began to focus on this way before the center right was thinking about these topics because you were involved there, Lasketti was involved there, Lucia was involved, Lucia Figaro, she should be a guest on the podcast too. So that's why we'll keep you we'll keep feeling sausage makers for listeners. But Lucia, she's fantastic. She did have had a great tenure in education, and she was also involved in immigration policy. And by the way, she was a victim of lover, and she survived that and went through hell, just like Aguirre had to go through hell. And of course, her name was clear too. But uh yeah, but back back to you.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Yeah, so it was an interesting time. As you say, Spain hadn't been a destination for immigration in its history. Uh on the contrary, Spain has been the origin of migrants for centuries, basically.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

And gallego Spaniards are called gallegos in Argentina because there's so many Spaniards, and many of them are from Galicia.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Absolutely. And so this ministry was created. One of our basic ideas was c caution with trying to plan immigration, because things can turn out very badly. Example, if you build areas of the city specifically for immigrants, you'll create ghettos. You know, we saw that in other parts of Europe where immigrants has have been directed to certain parts of the cities, the outskirts of Paris, for example, and for integration, that has been terrible. In Spain, however, we didn't do that, and basically, you know, it was spontaneous. Immigrants arrived in our city and they integrated spontaneously, and in general, it worked. Immigration has not been a worry, a preoccupation for Spaniards, even during the hardest economic times. The big financial crisis in Spain is in 2008, 2009. In other countries, that coincided with anti-immigration feelings in Spain did not happen. It did not happen at all. Immigration for 25 years has always been very low in uh in the preoccupation of Spaniards, and it's become a preoccupation, a worry in the last two or three years. And one of the parties in Spain, you were mentioning before box and its populist radical ideas, one of the our main uh policies has been trying to stoke an anti-immigration feeling in Spain, which traditionally has not existed. It has not existed, and yet uh, you know, that's one of the main issues we have in Spain. We worked on immigration policies, we worked on you know making sure that integration worked, and in general, it worked. You know, we had hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived in Madrid in very few years, in in 10, 15 years. You had hundreds of thousands of South Americans, Romanians, a lot of Romanians. There was a time when the largest foreign population in Madrid was Romanians. Now it's gone down because Romania has gone up, and so many of Romanians have just gone back to their country.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

How how did you plan for the policies towards integration? That's obviously a very technical.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Can I jump in here just for one second? I have uh in my hands right now a document that has never been released. It's a 2007 memo in which you were involved with. It was put together as part of a five discussion for the Madrid government. And it's called A Liberal Vision of Immigration Policy. And it set out the following principles. This document has never been seen before, but this is the basis of the immigration policy. One, the immigrant is a person, not a member of a collective or ethnic group. Two, the immigrant is a free and responsible individual. Three, the immigrant is not a victim, but a person capable of achieving greater prosperity through his own effort. Four, the immigrant also prefers freedom and democracy, hence C-Smooth. Five, there is no collective guilt. Seeing each immigrant as an individual distinct from all others also means rejection of any notion of collective guilt. Six, integration, proximity, and cordiality lead to a pluralist and prosperous society. Closeness towards immigrants, cordiality towards their presence, normal interaction among people who live together and share a different personal experience, as well as an active policy of support for those in need, are part of our liberal vision of immigration policy. That was the founding document that you were involved with crafting that others were involved with, and this was an Esperanza Girl mandate of okay, give me, send me out a series of guidelines for immigration policy.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

So then how did you think about integration? Because it's also easy to say that, well, we should have integration of immigrants. How then do you actually plan that to happen?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, I think these ideas Diego has just said are absolutely basic. An immigrant is not a part of a group, he's a person, and he has to be treated as such. If you see immigrants just as a member of an ethnic group or bloc, or exactly a bloc, you're going to apply socialist policies, you're going to difficult their integration. What is the key here? Immigrants have come to work in general to Spain. They're much more entrepreneurial in general than the average Spaniard because they have the courage to go to another country and to find a better atmosphere and a better future for themselves and for their family, and they come here to work. In general, they come here to work. And that shows up in the statistics, by the way. It is let me say this correctly. Immigrants have a double propensity to become entrepreneurs than do Spaniards. I think the figure is more or less the following. I think it's about 10% of Spaniards that become entrepreneurs in the wide sense, meaning they put up a shop, they put up a small business, whatever. When it comes to immigrants, it's almost 20%. In general, because their own economies are much more entrepreneurial, much rarer in their original countries to be working for someone else. No, it's much more common to work for yourself. And so they replicate that idea in Spain. So the basic policy is to favor that energy that comes from the immigrants to make their integration through work easier.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Let me add that participation rates for just all uh forms of employment, self-employed and entrepreneurs plus those who work for others, is close to 80% on the foreign-born population. This is one of the highest rates across Europe, and Spain's uh overall is 65% for national born. Now, of course, there's disparities there depending on origins. Uh so such things as regional patterns do exist, but the overall average is extremely high, it's 80%. And for some groups like Venezuelans, uh it's close to 90%.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

You will have a pushback, usually when people hear about Spain and Spain immigration policy, that they will say, Oh, but do you mean all the Latinos that come to Spain already speaking Spanish, they're already Catholic, they already kind of know Spaniard's history? What about then the other groups? You know, we we often can't easily avoid group, you know, connotations, but like Northern African groups, for example, or other groups in other parts of Africa, people always have, but isn't that a risk if you're not going to manage your immigration policy to particular groups? Even though, yes, one would in theory want to have a more individual-based view towards immigration.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

In this sense, I think the the great debate is the dangers of multiculturalism. When you have a foreign foreign population that has a different language, different religion, different customs, different culture, whatever, the temp the temptation, especially from the left, is to defend multiculturalism. And to think that rules have to be different depending on the group. That is exactly the contrary to what we defended in Madrid and what we think is a liberal integration policy. The laws have to be the same for everyone because you're judged as a person and not as a member of a group. And therefore, the worst thing that can happen is that uh, you know, because I don't know, you have certain customs in your own countries, that the law has to be changed in this country to adapt to your origin. No, that is going to be that that creates exclusion, that creates ghettos, that is exactly the contrary of what of what you have to do. And this links with another idea which I think is basic, which is uh immigration is a great test on whether your society is open or closed. And I think that uh the liberal basic idea is that you you have to the government has to build open societies. And the enemies of an open society are you know are socialism socialism, but they are also nationalism. And to and sort of this idea that you have to preserve a certain purity in your country, that foreigners are pollutant to that purity, and uh therefore you have to you have to preserve uh your country and you have to put barriers to uh to the foreigners, just as you put barriers, I don't know, uh in the in the form of of taxes or or tolls to uh foreign imports or whatever. No, if you want to build uh uh an open society as we wanted to do in Madrid, and I think they're that that is one of our greatest uh achievements in Madrid right now, part of the proof that you've built an open society is that you attract immigrants and that they integrate in your society. Um and that they feel Madrillian, even if they were born in Peru or in Bucharest or in Morocco. And that is the value added of our society. That that opportunity, that this is a society of opportunities, and if you come to seize those opportunities, it doesn't matter where you're from, is your capacity to work that will be judged and that will bring you success or not. A closed society is exactly the contrary to that. That you're judged by who you are, by what your roots are, by what your family name is, and not by your capacity to work.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

A clear example of planned, managed migration in Spain is that of Catalunya. Absolutely. Catalunya decided they did not want to favor any sort of Hispanic immigration because of a language thing. It is hard for a Colombian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, Argentinian to go back to not go back, but go and live in Spain, and in a sense, go back to the motherland, because many of the blood that runs through the veins of citizens if in Latin America is partially Spanish. So that idea of going back to the motherland and being in Spain, but suddenly being told that you're not really in Spain and you should not speak Spanish. And for you to integrate here in Catalonia, you actually have to despise Spain and speak Catalonia in something that just doesn't fly with these individuals that would traditionally look at Barcelona as a more, apparently in principle, more open society, cosmopolitan society. But once you actually go there and you see its decline through the past several decades, you realize that that idea of a closed separatist elite that has crafted an immigration policy that is coherent with that nationalist version, that essentially leaves you out as an individual. It does not allow you to express yourself and develop yourself through your own capabilities. But it rather asks you and demands you to fit into a particular category. And it's interesting because they will tolerate multiculturalism, they will accept the fact that there is these ghettos of people that do not learn the language or do not integrate in common shared customs of any Western society, which has led to this completely schizophrenic situation right now, in which you have the far-right separatists and the populist right unionists, and they both lead the charge against migration because it has been a terrible mistake. And even the separatists realize now that by favoring this sort of policy, they have missed out on many opportunities that have been realized by Madrid, and they have created many problems by having a targeted policy of migration that just differentiates between blocks and ones those blocks that are less compatible with our values, A and B less compatible with Spanish idea, language, and just the overall country and its customs and traditions and languages. So I think in that sense, the Madrid versus Catalunya or Barcelona comparison that is typical from you know all the way back to sports and of course in politics and economics and history and culture is just another example of how Madrid got it and how Barcelona got it.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

I need to get some more detail on this because this one's again, this is one of the key topics that all these are. Madrid does not have immigration policy technically, nor does Catalonia technically have policies.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

If you exclude individuals that know Spanish and you expect them.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

But how do they do that?

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Well, essentially, schools do not teach Spanish uh for a few hours, so your children will immediately go from being able to learn to being illiterate. You can't enter government jobs of any kind, and that represents 20% of the labor force, so you're also excluded from that. Many companies that are on the private sector, you get asked if they're tendering or doing any sort of service to actually service your customers in Catalan, so you're also excluded if you just know Spanish. And this de facto creates an exclusion from uh economic and educational life. Then cultural life is also run on the official level only in Catalan. You turn on the regional TVs, you read the newspapers, you go through, you turn on the radio, you don't hear Spanish as even as half as much as people actually do speak Spanish in the territory. So there is an official exclusion based on language. Now, for those cultures that want to be integrating into society, that is a problem. Now, for those cultures that are fine with just being left out of official society and like to ghetto more around their own, just bringing aside of their home cultures into Barcelona, but living completely outside of Barcelona in terms of political, economic, social life, cultural life, replicating other models but not integrating into just participating pluralistically in their society, that flies, but it doesn't for many others.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

One thing to add to everything that Diego just said Catalunya has actively promoted for North African immigration for the last years. Why? Because they don't speak Spanish. And they thought that it would be a benefit for Catalunya since they didn't speak Spanish and so they would learn Catalan before they learned Spanish. The problem with them for South American immigration is that they spoke Spanish. And if your society is to be built by people with is to be built by linguistical discrimination, and you want to favor Catalan in against Spanish, you don't want Spanish-speaking immigration. And so Spanish-speaking immigration has traditionally come to Madrid and not to Catalonia. And I think that has been tougher for Catalunya and that has helped integration.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

And then let me jump to pop culture for a second, uh, because this could sound like I'm doing something that is not too intellectual, but I think it really reflects a lot. Rosalia, an extremely famous Spanish artist, she is Barcelona-born, but she openly cultivates the roots of flamenco and many other musical influences that come from the whole of Spain. She does not record in Catalan like other Catalan artists did back in the day. Of course, this doesn't mean she has something against Catalan identity, but very recently she was hosting one of her concerts, a very celebrated new album, and she, of course, she would bring some guests. And a guest there was a lady called Bad Guial, who is a superstar for trap music, a bit of a dirtier version of reggaeton, by no means any high kind of music, just something urban to dance and quite sexual, I must say. And both of them are Catalan, and both of them were speaking Spanish. And the arena was full of people who were perfectly fine with that. They were okay with it. These are young Catalonians that are used to they have Netflix, they have Spotify, they watch reality shows and TV shows, and they watch Elite and other soft power of Spanish culture, if you wish. And they don't have a problem with this sort of identitarian politics. You know who do? The people that comment on the videos on YouTube and Twitter who are extremely upset that how is it that these two artists who are Catalonian are speaking in Spanish while giving a concert in Barcelona? And that it really shows how much they're ticked off when they see that language is not used in the way they want it to use, in an exclusionary way.

unknown 42:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Those people were organized, whereas the people, I mean, the people who were making those comments on the YouTube were organized, probably. They were probably on the payroll of some nationalist organization. Whereas the people who went to the concerts were spontaneous, and they were just enjoying their time without anybody having to tell them what to do.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Another example is Spain wins the World Cup, and there's suddenly the football or the Euro Cup, and there's Spanish flags everywhere in Catalunya, and literally that's the first time there's ever been Spanish flags in Catalunya out in the open. Or the Spanish football team played a game in Barcelona very recently, and the national anthem was chanted by literally dozens of millions of people, well, dozens of thousands of people, and this is something that is uh was unusual to happen in Catalonia, and it's happening now because that idea is crumbling and it's not just related to migration.

SPEAKER_01 43:48

It's just so to sum up your uh the response to your question is you know, how do you build this? I think the basic idea is you build an open society, you you build the blocks for an open. society to thrive. Whereas the counterexample is Catalunya, which in in in many respects have have been building a closed society in linguistical terms, in economic terms, in so many terms. Whereas here in Madrid we have consciously been building an open society and that affects many different aspects of our life here. It is of course the economic side but as well the immigration side. And an open society is open to immigration with respect to the law, a law which applies to everybody irrespective of your origin and that judges you by who you are, not the bloc that you supposedly are part of. You are judged as an individual. And I think immigrants in general want to be judged as individuals and not as part of some bloc from overseas.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

Two out of four people working in Madrid are not from Madrid and one out of four would be from other territories in Spain. Which by the way I it's my case. And that means that but that de facto the seat is not based that the region is not based on a subsidy economy, a subsidized economy, but rather based on work economy, not a welfare economy. That is also relevant for those that come from abroad. Like one out of seven Madrillians comes from Latin America and one out of four comes from either Latin America or another country from anywhere else. And I think that has permeated into the Madrid model that perhaps at first was very ideological. It was a creation of bias and the classical liberals that enacted these policies but then it has become a natural experiment in that people that come here know that they're signed by moving to Madrid you're kind of signing a contract that says come here work and make it on your own and you'll be free.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Absolutely so continuing on your journey towards the economics but it's linked.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

Yes of course I I'm happy that we did this little diversion because it's absolutely linked. I think it I it'll become clear to our people who are listening that an open society policy to immigration is basically based on the same ideas as an open society for economics. And so after working on immigration I worked on economics and the ideas applied are basically the same. You have to put rules for people or your job as a government is to create rules for people to thrive for themselves. You are not here to judge for them. You're not here to judge them on based on their origins or their social class but just to make sure that they have the opportunities to thrive by themselves. And so the time in which I arrived in my economic responsibilities was a tough time. It was 2011 2012 Spain was going through a very tough economic crisis we almost went officially bankrupt and and so the toughest the toughest goal we had was to maintain our principles, our ideas when the easy solution would have been to betray them. Meaning we could have raised taxes we could have been more interventionist in our policies and that's exactly the contrary to what we did. We maintained that taxes must be uh low even in tough times even when you had to reduce your spending because your income was going down and that's what we did. So in one year I did three budgets. I did well I did excuse me the arrogance there the ministry I was responsible for approved three budgets and we kept approving them because the ink the income of Madrid regional government was going down because the economic activity was going down and so to give context we're speaking of the of the Great Recession.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

Now for uh American speakers you immediately think 2007 eight right Spain took a little bit more in Spain the downturn really began in between 2008 and nine and because of the Zapatero government taking all the wrong measures the pain was really felt in 2010 11 and then finally when Rajoy takes over he does not take the most optimal stabilization measures I think so Spain's crisis lasted until 2013 14 and so it was a W-shaped crisis.

SPEAKER_01 48:24

Exactly we went down we went up and we went down again and set and the second down was probably worse than the first one and that's exactly when I was in my responsibilities the first uptick was not a real uptick it was a stimulus based uptick so of course it it had to be short based.

SPEAKER_00 48:41

So the apparent slight improvement in between 2009 and 10 immediately came crashing down when Spain ran out of credit. And there was a serious talk of Spain having to be bailed out it it was placed right there with Greece and the other countries that were doing very poorly Portugal was too and then when Percival comes on comes on board this is 2011. So how do you get the call?

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Actually it wasn't a call so let me tell you about that. So we had elections in I think it was May 2011 and Partido Popular wants an absolute majority the results were extremely good for Esperanza Ire. I think she had more than 50% of the votes so 52 or something like that. It was it was great in tough times I mean the context was exactly what Diego is saying you know economically it was tough times but even so it didn't affect her popularity. And so there was a proclamation so to say of Esperanza as the new president of Madrid um so there was a big ceremony in Puerta del Sol which is the headquarters of the Madrid presidency. And I was working I was a director general in in the in foreign well and cooperation and in within the immigration ministry. And so I went there and at the end I you know I went to congratulate Esperanza I said you know congratulations on being a president again and she took me by hand and said I have to speak to you and I said so I've I raised my eyebrows I'm thinking of naming you Minister of Economics. Would you be interested so I've I froze I certainly didn't see this coming and I said yeah of course you know and she said okay I want to see you I want to interview so come tomorrow at whatever time and we'll talk about this so I didn't sleep a lot during that night I didn't see this coming. And the next day I who do you think was vouch for you in a sense because surely she knew of you yeah I didn't have a very strong relationship with her exactly I think a key person here was Regino which was her chief of staff.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

Yes yes I'd been working with him so Regino is a very interesting personality he's someone who's who thrives in uh in the shadows but in the best sense of the term no Regino is kind of uh of course I mean this in a work environment but kind of a husband to her in the sense that they've taken decisions together they've worked together he's been by her side the whole time so it's kind of a political marriage in a way just like today's governor uh Isabel Diazaduso has an extremely close relationship to her chief of staff Miguel Angel Rodriguez they have dinner together they have lunch together they they work at his home and they think together like a marriage would at a personal level Regino was the right hand I think he was her chief of staff formerly formerly chief of staff and but more than that and he often said and she often said Esperanza had proposed him to ascend him to become a minister and he always said no and he was capable of saying things to Esperanza that no one else would say I mean there's a great Thatcher had that with uh Keith Johnson for there's this funny anecdote Esperanza would would say to Regino Regino tell me the truth and he would answer you don't pay me enough to tell you the truth which I think is a very response.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

He was I think she was very good in not surrounding herself by Jess men which exactly so he would agree when he didn't agree with something he would say so openly because he didn't want to want to have a political career on his own.

SPEAKER_00 52:10

And still today they they they amically they fight. Oh yeah so you have dinner with them you have lunch with them and they'll fight all the time very close friends they fight all the time friendly principle based but and it's a very funny and and interesting and enriching dynamic.

SPEAKER_01 52:24

So you think he vouched for you but it does he was the paper's man so anybody who wrote papers would send them to Regino and if Regino liked your papers that was a strong point for you. So he took you two two steps above your position. And then there's another thing which I've been told was important so this is another anecdote during the election campaign I was responsible for immigrants no within the party and so we organized so an open air speech in Lava Pies in the center of Madrid which is known for being very left wing there's a lot of immigrants but there's a lot of left wing activists. So they're not used to having the right wing people come to give speeches in the middle of their area.

SPEAKER_00 53:07

And so we organized this with other immigrants so we had a Peruvian speaking we had a Bolivian speaking and stuff it was called Nuevos Madrileños I think exactly New Madrillian that was the name of the concept of the immigration it still works. It's still around it was born there and now they they called uh every immigrant or madrillions but it was born at the time and so we did this meeting for Nuevos Madreneños in Lava Pies and what happened was that they must have sent you know what's between them and we suddenly had 300 activists left wing activists booing at us and throwing eggs and being very aggressive and we decided we were not moving.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

We said we're not going to be intimidated by these left wing people and so we stayed and it became very tense and police had to come and so on and then someone took a video of that and it circulated and it arrived to Regino and to Esperanza and I think that also helped. Did you get hit with an egg somebody didn't hit me but they threw an egg at me and and we were basically escorted by the police and uh I mean you've picked up bullets from the streets of Jakarta's whole these folks are not going to intimidate I mean but it it's part of the mentality. I think that's the sort of mentality that Esperanza likes no that you're not going to be intimidated by the left. If you're in politics and you follow her school she can accept anything except being intimidated by the left you've come here to do your job and these arrogant and violent people are not going to impose their will on you. So you keep yourself and you don't and you don't let them win.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

I have very vivid memories of Esperanza inaugurating hospitals and the unions that were not very happy about the fact that a center right government was developing so many new hospitals and completely taking away the narrative that this was the what the left would do and the right would do the otherwise and actually close them. And I have very vivid memories of these folks getting in her face which was quite aggressive it was pretty aggressive protests against her. I never once saw her take a step back I saw her essentially take it and just answer back to anyone that was confronting her. So she was up for the challenge obviously she's a lady she's so she doesn't need to be involved in that sort of aggressive type of politics but she wouldn't be scared.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

And this was a few days before the Kinteme the famous Kinteme where so this was probably that that needs context for her so quinteme is a movement by the left it's similar to Occupy Wall Street I think it was at it was before it was before so if it's a movement by the left by which the Occupy occupy public space and they try to impose the ideas you know anti-democratically as they often do. And so in Spain they occupied the La Puerta del Sol in Madrid which is one of the main public spaces in Madrid which is right in front of the presidency of the Comunidad Madrid. And so you had thousands of people camped there for a few weeks.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

I must say this was all politically that the far left but the media would just buy that this was somewhat spontaneous right so what we did is we actually went down because if you just show it from the way up you just see a mass of people and you just buy into the narrative oh the youth are so fed up with politics this was precisely coming in when the center right was going to win at the regions by a landslide and a new election was going to be held in fact it was held at the end of 2011 and it was another landslide by the center right. So it was their last attempt to hold on to it they were clearly trying to position the crisis on the right which made no sense Zapatero was president at the time and he led Spain into bankruptcy and I think what I was as you know I'm a journalist too what I did was I actually brought cameras with me to go down and speak to these folks and show what type of ideas these people spoused and how many of them were professors from public universities or activists from far left groups. Exactly but uh for the first few days it was presented as a spontaneous demonstration of people who just were just camping out on the streets just to protest.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Exactly when it really wasn't so we probably unknown to us we probably stepped on these people toes a few days before in this campaign and they were already getting organized and it was the same people who came to boycott our um our event who a few days later camped in the 15 so you know it's a funny coincidence. So all this to say why I probably ended up being considered for the post. And so Esperanza she interviewed me and the interview must have gone well and so at the end of the day what did you discuss in the interview? It was a very personal interview you know what my life had been why I think I would be good for the post what my ideas would be for that so a lot of getting to know me as a person. Because we'd never sat down and spoke for an hour. So that that was probably you know who is this guy? Politicians they're they're a bit let me say this in the best possible way they're a bit like dogs in the sense that they smell people and that's the way that they get to know them. No so an interview in this sense is you know who is this guy? Let me sense who he is let me smell him in his in his details. So that's how it went for an hour. It was a long interview and so I passed. And then so I was in this post for not very long it was a year and a half but it was intense. So we had this buttery things we were talking about. And then another of the highlights of course is this law to approve free timing you know that any shop in Spain or Madrid can can open when it wants.

SPEAKER_02 58:52

I think this law comes up so often on our podcast it's hilarious.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

It's an important step stone because Madrid is the only region the region to this day that has approved it and uh and it was a big political fight but it shows that if you win it there's no turning back.

SPEAKER_02 59:11

So I want I want to get into that and this little comes up so often we have to get some details here.

SPEAKER_00 59:16

We were just meeting Rashid and I have a meeting with representatives from uh British and Irish think tanks and they were very interested to it's a very popular but before we get there before the the fiscal side is something we also want to tackle. So you're dealing here with a problem that transcends the regional government it's obviously on the national government's poor horrendous economic policy especially with a labor market that had 25% plus unemployment that's crazy. It's just a crazy number and obviously this leads to plummeting revenues which means you have to change the budget not once but twice but three times. So you had to find expenditure cats everywhere and I'm assuming like Spain has not had a budget surplus since essentially 2007 so we don't even know what that is it's been 20 budgets without a surplus but then you see how the Malay government in Argentina was able to achieve a budget surplus in a country that was bankrupt in one month. So if you want to do it you can do it. So how did you do it? How did you turn that red ink and were able to turn it around you you have to go into details.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

Let me talk about a book of yours Diego this the Liberalismo La Madrena in English it's called it's going to be called the Madrid model it will be Albert Institute later this year. Well one of the graphs you have in your book is expenditures in Madrid historically and I found it interesting because I hadn't seen it before is how expenditures in Madrid actually go down in 2011 2012 which is by a long time I mean and I anybody who's listening will know how difficult it is to spend less in a crisis time. But we had to do it so we basically you go into details and certain privileges which existed until then you have to deny them. I think Millet clear is a clear example of this certain groups in Argentina who considered rights certain payments were actually privileges that they were receiving because of their political clout and milet has come and said no this is not a this is not a right this is a privilege we can't afford it so we're gonna stop paying for this in Argentina it's I think in the public library they had 1000 people working there or something like it's exaggerated no what has this happened in Argentina.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:29

At a different level of course in Madrid we had certain privileges for example uh trade unions were receiving public payments that went down they were receiving certain hours that they didn't have to work because of their trade union activities so that was reduced I have the numbers here you have them there they are amazing so prior to you taking office in between 2007 and 2018 sorry 2007 and 2008 there was a first budget cut of 414 million euros we're speaking of a government budget that was roughly 20 billion okay so it was first more than 400 million and then in between 2008 and 2010 there is a further cut under your mandate of around 2 billion if you compare to the highest level of expenditures that the regional government has. And by the way the volume of expenditures that were kept was essentially the same until 2018-19. So not only did you cut expenditures but you set an informal ceiling that was respected for for almost one decade and well there's another idea I wanted to put on the table which is the following bureaucracies tend to grow naturally and they try to cover policies which are not naturally theirs.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:49

And a regional government in Spain has basic responsibilities which are health hospitals and health centers education and infrastructure that is more or less meaning meaning transport. Infrastructure meaning transport exactly that's more or less 80-85% of the budget when it's the time of crisis you go back to basics and you say okay what is our job here our job is to provide these services and everything that's grown outside that which is a natural habitat in bureaucracies they sort of want to cover other responsibilities which are not theirs you cut and say no this we are not here to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:32

So we centered on back to basics what is it we do and how are we going to do it spending less and so for example something we did as well with Lucia Figaro which we've mentioned before is the number of hours Madrid professors at school worked went up before they worked I don't remember the numbers so the total number was the same but out of that number they would spend less and less hours teaching and have more time to start or whatever and we we don't know what that time meant like coffee and so the number of hours that worked went up so these type of activities didn't you cut the number of union representatives that are exempt from work exactly because if I'm all right you had 3500 of them but according to the law you could restrict it a lot so you cut 2500 government positions that were occupied by union members just by being union members and their job was to just be a union representative and we call that liberado which means you're liberated from work. You're just supposed to be like the eyes of the union on the government sector. So you cut down by more than 2000 of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:39

And there's another idea which is important in Spain there we differentiate between what we called impuestos y tasas. Impuestos are taxes are the price you pay for a public service but when you are the user of that public service a tax is something you pay irrespective of whether you use the service or not. Okay so what had happened is that cost had during time covered less and less of the actual cost of the service so instead of being I don't know 75% of the cost you were paying for 50% of the cost. So what we did is we increased the tasas that if you were going to buy uh public service for your own personal use the price you paid was almost what the cost of that public service was that's what we call in Spain tasas. And and so the the subvention the subsidy subsidy on the subsidy low prices was revised the subsidy was reduced for those public services.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:44

And one question how did you work with your team? Of course that you get the mandate right but you know that you're going to have to cut expenses how did you order this? Did you say give me a I don't know five percent overall reduction or identify me X million of euros or how do you structure The cuts and how did you work with other departments? Because technically speaking, you're a minister, you're not above the other ministers, but they have expenditures that you need them to cut. So, of course, you have a mandate from Aguirre to cut expenditures, but technically speaking, you're not above your peers, you're a the they are colleagues of yours.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:18

So that was a lot of meetings, a lot of talking to other ministries, especially to health and education. That's where the money was. So we had to sit a long time with Lasquetti, who was the health minister, and Lucia Figueroa, who was the education minister. So we as the Treasury Department knew how much money, more or less, we had to cut. But then we also had to respect the priorities that those ministries had. You have to respect that others know more than yourself. I hope that is the topic or the recurring topic of our podcast. You have to respect that you know less than the others. So you would sit down with the other ministries and say, look, we have to cut this. You know better than we do what the priorities are, because you know how important these programs are.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

Don't you give them a flat line figure and then let them find for now?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:11

And then you could you could prod them a little. They had certain organizations within their ministries, and you would say, is this really necessary? Could we cut this? What happens if it doesn't exist? Will something stop functioning if it doesn't exist?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:25

So you prod it. But you were quite lucky because uh I did not remember that you had to work with Laschetti and Lucia, which is like if you're a football coach and you work with you know Cristiano and Messi. That those are like it's not that hard, I guess, to get budget. I'm sure there was some complicated conversations. Well, you had to insist. But but they believe in these ideas.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:44

They believe in the ideas and they knew what the situation was. I mean, it was really a very, very difficult situation. But others everybody knew they had to cut. What about others?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:52

They were was everyone on board? I mean, I transport I've al I've always heard is kind of unmanageable. I I don't know who was in charge at this time, but I've always heard that transport is very difficult to manage here in Madrid.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Well, the easier part with transport is that they have building budgets, and if they haven't started them, it's more or less easy to stop them or to postpone them. If there's recurring expenditure, you can't do anything with that. If you have to build uh metro station, you have to finish the battle metro.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:21

Did you cancel the city of justice? I mean, postpone it? No, that had been already postponed.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

But any new infrastructure, you had to postpone it. Delay that. Yeah, you there was no money to do that. And then there's other sort of more, I don't know how to say this, social spending, but not the basic social spending. I mean, of course, helping, I don't know, handicapped communities and so on, of course, you would maintain that. But there were other expenditures that you can consider reducing.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:51

Around the same time, there was the amendment in the constitution, the budget stability amendment for article 135. Did you think that was a good thing to do at the time?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:02

Absolutely. I mean, I I think it was a very good idea. I think it was the time to do it. I think any constitution and any government any government has to have a straitjacket in its expenditure. Because the natural the natural behavior of bureaucracies is to spend more. There's always more necessities to be taken care of. There's always more people who need to be helped from the bureaucracy, or so some people think. And so it's expensive. A government by nature is always expensive. So there has to be some type of limit to that. And if that limit is in the constitution, it'll work better. So I think that was a good idea, and it's been respected until now.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:47

Okay. So now we want to get some more details on why did you push forward at this time the liberalization hours law? And like, how did it come up into commerce? Yes, it's a thing that one should do, but how did it really come up to push for a law?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:04

Okay. So this requires a certain explanation. In Spain, the regions decide how many days a month big department stores can open. This is ludicrous, but it's the law. And so for certain years, Madrid had been augmenting the days that big department stores could open. So at the time, I don't know, it maybe had been 20 days a month. Or and so it had increased to 22 days a month, so on and so forth. The justification for this is that you were protecting the smaller stores by making them more difficult for the big stores to open. So the competition for the smaller stores was limited. So when I arrived, I don't forget, I don't remember the figures, but you know, let's say that big department stores could open 24 days every month. And so my first instinct was to increase it to 25 or 26. So that was my first proposal. And what happened was that everybody was complaining about it. You know, if we approve this, it's gonna be terrible and so on. And the big stores were saying that's not enough, it doesn't solve any problems, and so on. And so my instinct after seeing that everybody was going to complain anyway, I said, Well, let's go all the way. If everybody's gonna complain, let's go all the way. Plus the fact that it was the arguments to let shops open whenever they wanted to were so strong, and I was seeing the arguments to the contrary, they were so weak that it really wasn't justified to keep the system as it was. This idea of certain days that you could open and certain days that you could own couldn't open, it was unjustifiable. And there was no reason to keep that.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

It created an artificial incoherency on the poles of the city. Because Madrid, by definition, is a very lively town. When you go to other places in Spain, we are certainly notorious for our late hours at our party and lifestyle culture, it's obvious. But amongst the largest cities, Madrid is famous for being essentially open and there's something to do every day, including Sundays, because the idea was for these big shops to close on Sundays.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:27

Anyone who's been in Madrid on a Sunday knows that it's completely open. And it was that time as well. It's busy, there's things happening. So why on earth could you go to the cinema or to a restaurant on a Sunday and you couldn't go to a department store? It makes absolutely no sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:42

That is that incoherence is still apparent today when you go to some touristic cities in Spain and you find restaurants maybe open, but then stores are closed. And these stores stand to make a lot more money opening up on the weekend when the tourists come than opening up in the middle of the week when it's just the locals and they're not likely to either have that much purchasing power or that much free time because it's a weekday and so on. So the research shows that Madrillians have diversified and improved. They have more free time, they structure their shopping habits differently, they save money because they can compare prices more and have more availability of more supply. And then also, one thing that is the most obvious outcome of this Madrid has become a magnet for tourism. Madrid has become a destination for tourism.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:28

Tourism, foreign tourism, and national tourism. There's people from all over Spain who come to Madrid on weekends to do some shopping or go to a musical. Trains work very well. So you'll have people from Andalucía, from Castilla-León, even from Catalunya who come here to spend the weekend.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:42

First disagreement of the podcast is trains work very well. Trains used to work very well, but I digress. That's a different part of it still very well.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:51

Was there internal friction in the ministry when you were proposing to go all the way?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:56

Not really, no. No, because for what I've said, the arguments were very low. It was a difficult time, it was a tough time because of the crisis, and we saw that it was justified. It had become almost common common knowledge that it made no sense for this to continue. And let me say this as well journalists are important in this because they are the ones who publish your ideas. And we had a number of meetings with journalists. You know, I sat down with them and I explained what we were gonna do. And of course, what do journalists judge things by? Their own experience. And journalists had difficulty doing their shopping if things are not open on a Sunday. It's it's funny, but it that's what happened. They you could see them in their faces saying, Yeah, it's true. I mean, why couldn't I go and do my shopping on a Sunday? You know, I work during the the week, I I I have trouble working, I I might have a family. Why can't I do my shopping on a Sunday? So, really the culture was there, so there wasn't going to be a lot of pushback. And then so what happened was initially we wrote sort of a very long law to approve this, and then we went to a meeting of the Council of Ministers, and Esperanza said, This is very long. I mean, uh, why do we need such a long law to approve this? I want this shortened. Why was it so long? I forget. I don't know, but I think it's probably the tendency of bureaucracies to write long laws. I mean, it's that's a very bureaucratic thing as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:22

Whatever is the Stockholm syndrome of trying to play with the previous wording of the law instead of just starting from quality is associated with quantity.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:32

It says this an important law has to be long, which is absurd. A comparison I did later on is uh the I I forget the number of the amendment by which uh slavery was abolished by Lincoln. I think it's 50 words or something, it's extremely short. And in general, in the world, important laws have been very short. I mean, I'm not gonna compare this.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

Uh 40 words long. That's the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment. 40 words long.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:02

And is there anything more important uh than that? Well, maybe a few things, but not many than the abolition of slavery in uh my story.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:10

I was, as you know, one of the intellectual fathers of the open market law, which leads to the automatic recognition of licenses and permits given by other regions, so that Madrid automatically allows them to be valid here, so you don't need an extra authorization. This is interesting, important because the constitutional court restricted the ability of the state to give you a national permit. So, in practice, if you want to operate across the different territories, you would in principle need 17 permits. But thanks to the open market law, now Madrid accepts whatever permit another region has given. And since then, uh four regions have adopted this or are on the process of adopting it. How long is that law? It's seven pages. Seven pages.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:49

Doesn't need to be longer. So that instinct was right. So we wrote it and we basically said an article in the law because there were other things that were approved in the law. But there was this article that said shop owners will open whenever they wish to open. That's it. And the logic makes every sense. Uh because until now, the shop owners had opened when the administration, when the government said they could open. So to in order to abolish that interpretation, you say the responsibility of opening will be entirely in the shop owner's hand.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:25

It's 14 pages, by the way, the law you did. The law, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:28

For the article that we're liberalized is one article, and I think it's 50 words long or even less, or 57 words long, is really short. And that's it. You didn't need anything else. Which means if you want to close on Sunday, you close on Sunday. But you take the responsibility as a shop owner to decide when you open and when you close.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:47

Article six, each business will determine with total freedom and with no type of legal restriction across all the region of Madrid which days it won it wants to open its shop.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:00

That's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:01

So that's what 35 words.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:03

It's one sentence. One sentence. So that's it. You didn't need anything else. Right. You didn't need anything complicated. You can open this Sunday, but not that Sunday. That's it. As a business, you open and you close when you decide to open and you close. If you want to open at three o'clock in the morning, because you think that's gonna be good for your business, you open at three o'clock in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:22

This is still a fight across the country. The large city with the highest number of restrictions right now is Jerez, which is run by the Partido Popular. You can go to Jerez, it has fantastic weather, fantastic wines, cherry wines come from Jerez for our British audience. But you can do your shopping. You're there on a Sunday, you go to the feria, you go to the wineries, and you can't do your shopping. So this is still a battle, and PP is to blame on many of these restrictions. Not in Madrid, certainly, but in many other territories.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:47

That's a particular question. From your view, I guess from inside, why do you think the Madrid in Pepe has substantially been a lot more of a liberalizing force than other regional Pepe administrations? Is it a stark difference?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:05

That's a great question. I think the leadership here is clearly Esperanza. She changed the framework of political debate in Spain. Before her, Madrid had not been a particularly pro-liberal region. Past governments were not political particularly pro-freedom, but Esperanza, her political heritage, is basically to have created that framework, and that framework is out of the question right now. Everybody who's come after her, to a to a bigger or larger degree, Isabela you saw now is a good example, has operated within that framework and has worked on that framework and has deepened that framework. Madrid is an area of freedom. Everybody defends that. And people who come to Madrid expect that from Madrid. So it's been self-fulfilling to a certain extent. And Madrillians feel comfortable with that. Here in Madrid, contrary to other parts in Spain, there is not a territorial identity. It's not that I don't know, you're a Galician or you're from Valencia in my case, because that's it. It's a given. Because your parents from here. And so in Madrid, you're Madrillian because you choose to live in Madrid. And you choose to operate like a Madrid, and you see this as a land of opportunities. And you want to keep Madrid as a land of opportunities. And people know what makes Madrid a land of opportunities. And they vote in that way. And even in the worst times of Partido Popular, when their political perspectives were low in Madrid or in the rest of Spain, people have kept voting for options that would keep that. There's a part of the far left in Madrid. But in general, the center and the right, and even part of the center left, they want to keep that character of Madrid. And this liberalization of the shop time is a good example. People have adapted to it. You don't want to change that. But you could apply that to hospitals, to education, to so many of the day-to-day features of Madrinian life that is defined by liberty, by freedom, by the freedom to choose of Madrillians.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:19

But you didn't answer the question. Because as I said, to be honest, some of them are copying the Madrid model, but they are doing it slowly.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:31

Andalucía, which had traditionally been very left-wing, in many aspects, have followed, and they say so, that they follow the Madrid, uh the Madrid model. There are certain differences in Madrid compared to other parts of Spain. Of course, Madrid is a very urban region, and these policies are, I think, better adapted to an urban region to a rural region. I mean, that's obvious. Liberalism to a big extent is uh is an urban ideology.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:57

Maybe a more cosmopolitan, more driven to competitiveness, whereas You know, it's interesting you you say that because in Europe, or even the US, but let's stick to Europe.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:09

I believe Madrid is the only capital city that is a center right, right-leaning majority. The only one.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

I double down. Most have communist mayors. That's that.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:20

Berlin, Paris.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:22

Good point. That's a great point. Uh Madrid is okay let me answer that in the best way I can, even if it's a very good point. Madrid is more than the city of Madrid, it's it's an entire region, no, and and it and it encompasses more cities.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:36

But Madrid's actual mayor still is Pepe and still is uh Almeida.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:40

Exactly. And this probably links to what we're gonna talk as well. We've had a communist major. I was in the I was a counselor in Madrid when we had a communist major, and it didn't work. People saw it, they there was a lot of frustration at the time, 2015. That's when Carmena, who's a communist card-carrying communist person, she became mayor. She was surrounded by communists and anarchists and far left, Maoists. And it didn't work. It didn't work. And it didn't work, and they were abandoned by those who were supposedly their biggest defenders. No, the south of Madrid is, let's say, the part of Madrid which is working class, working class, lower income, and so on. They were the ones who made Carmena lose in the election in 2019 because they because they saw that it was fake, that whatever she was defending was not being provided, was not being delivered.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:33

Let's go to that Piro, shall we? 2015. Well, no, let's go to that Piro. But first, let me ask you about a very exotic project that almost happened here in Madrid. It would have been the development of a large, extremely large resort uh promoted by the Las Vegas Suns Corporation, which was owned by Sheldon Adelson, who has now passed away. But he was one of the main developers of Macau and also a key businessman in the city of Las Vegas, key contributor to the Republican Party, by the way, and a relevant member of the Jewish community in the United States. Now, Sheldon Adelson recognized the merits of the Madrid model, and he wanted to build a huge complex here. Include a convention center, casino, a couple of hotels, entertainment areas, sports venues, and you were involved in trying to land this large foreign investment, which almost happened but did not happen. Can you tell everyone about this so-called Eurovegas project, which is how it was called by the media, Eurovegas?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:29

So the first meeting I had as a minister was on this. We had a meeting with different people because this had been being worked on for a few months or even a year before I arrived. But it became public to a big extent when I became minister, and it became public because Madrid and Barcelona competed to attract the investment. No, so we both made our pitches. Actually, to tell the story, both a Catalan and a Madrillian delegation went to Las Vegas to pitch Sheldon Adelson our offering so that he would invest in our region. So this was a weekend, and so we spent the weekend, so we arrived on a Friday. But did you overlap with the Catalans? So the Catalans they made their pitch on a Saturday. So during the Saturday, we sort of walked around Las Vegas and I lost $100 playing Blackjack, or Blackjack, exactly. I just took out the $100 that I'm not gonna play anymore. The other person who came, by the way, is uh someone you might know. It's Martinez Almeida, the current mayor. He was at the time of Madrid. He was he worked in the region of Madrid. He was sort of the most important lawyer, and so he came as a legal expert to the meeting, and so we walked around, uh Almeida and I on a Saturday, and Almeida won money, actually. So the money I lost, uh Almeida won. And then and so we waited for our turn, and on Saturday, it was the Catalans, and we had our pitch on a Sunday very early in the morning, but it might have been seven o'clock or something in the morning. Sheldon he worked uh non-stop, and so we had our meeting on uh Sunday at seven o'clock. So I made the pitch, and of course, as these things happen, I started to make the pitch, and 10 minutes after the pitch, he destroyed my pitch because he started asking questions that had nothing to do with the structure of what I decided to present and so on. So this is how things are supposed to be. He was grilling you. He was grilling. Exactly. I mean, it's not what I wanted to tell him, but what he wanted to know that was important, so he made all sorts of questions, and then on the plane back to Spain, the Catalan delegation and ourselves were on the same plane. So we're in the airport waiting to board, and we sort of said hello to each other. How did it go? Well, but of course, we didn't go into any details. Um, and we flew back, and so eventually we won. Madrid was chosen by Adelson, but then I left government and eventually the investment wasn't made because I mean Las Vegas Sans is a huge corporation, they had different investment possibilities around the world, and they decided to invest in Korea.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:06

What was it about Madrid that he chose Madrid over Catalunya at the time?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:11

Well, I think it's mostly what we're talking about. It was the open society and the open and the pro-business policies we have in Madrid. The the piece of land itself was pretty good. It was very big. It was close to the airport. You know, the the infrastructure to get to the airport was good. All the regional and local governments, we were well coordinated. And in general, there was not going to be a big pushback. There was a bit of a pushback. There's always people who complain about anything anti capitalist, exactly disguised as neighbors, uh associations. Yeah, there were some people saying, you know, these Americans are going to invade Spain, whatever. And in Catalunya, I think they had more of a problem with that. They had more um urban planning issues in Catalunya as well. The permits and so on were not going. be easy in general the infrastructure in Madrid is good. The health infrastructure, I remember they they asked a lot about that. You know, health, how how was that going to help in the transport too? Transport from the airport.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:13

Catalunya did eventually land a separate project by the Hard Rock Group, which as you know is owned by indigenous tribes. But they were unable to uh bring it to fruition because of more bureaucracy and and a lot of anti-capitalist rhetoric by the left-wing separatist parties. So neither of these was realized but interestingly enough Madrid did approve under your leadership some changes to fast track large investment projects and now that is an avenue that is leveraged by many large investments in Madrid. So although that large Las Vegas resorts did not make it to Madrid, it is true that some of the deregulation that was put into place to facilitate this sort of investments has now been one of the reasons why it's easier to bring in foreign investment. And I say this because our readers our listeners will be surprised to know that roughly seven out of 10 euros that are invested in Spain are invested in Madrid. And prior to this period this was not the case. So that deregulation although it did not land the Adelson project it has facilitated foreign investment in large projects.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:18

Madrid has become a magnet for foreign investment in all of Spain yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:22

So local politics you were also involved there. So you get a call by Spanish Aguirre who is now going to be mayor of Madrid. Spoiler she'll end up winning the election but failing to earn a majority by just one seat which means that she will sit as the opposition leader. And so you were probably expecting to be in government but the contrary ends up happening for just a single seat but it's true it was a seat that enabled the left wing parties to garner majority. So I want to ask you two questions. The first one it's how does Esperanto call you to tell you to join her candidacy for mayor of Madrid? I mean how was that like and what plans did you have for the city?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:58

But before you even answer that could you give some color also what were we even saying that Esperanto went from the presidency to the mayor like that part is not clear she had cancers she had a cancerous diagnosis so for health reasons she had to step down.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:14

She retired in 2012 but she kept being the president of the party in Madrid so she left office but not exactly she left the presidency of the region of Madrid but she was still a political force in Madrid she was still the president of Parti Popular Madrid and so in the elections these were in May 2015 you know she was elected she was chosen by the party to be the candidate to be the mayor of Madrid.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:39

So I mean internal polls internal polls showed that she was PP was going to do horribly she did extremely well compared to I mean she won the election but she did way better than all other PP candidates in large cities.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:54

It was the there was a wave of far left candidacies that did very well in 2015 in Spain. I mean they won in major cities all across Spain in Barcelona they won they they governed Madrid but they were very far from winning in Madrid but they won large in Barcelona in La Coronia in many cities there it was sort of a a wave of far left candidacies that did very well in in in Spain during those years. And so we have so with this mayor who is a lady called Manuela Carmena who'd been a communist member and her candidacy is a hodgepodge of far left she was a judge by the way she was a judge yes she was a judge for some time one of these judges who think that 90% of people in prison shouldn't be in prison literally this is this she said in an interview you know one of these people with very strange ideas of law application but uh but she gave this idea sort of being an elderly nice lady and so on as she hid her communist tendencies.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:54

She was particularly sorry she was chosen by Podemos which was the far left communist party whose origins were funded by the Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan Russia as well as Iran. So this platform led to the birth of Podemos but at the local level very smartly instead of positioning themselves with any of these crazy ideologues that they had who eventually became the main members of the government and made Carmena sometimes look like a normal person compared to them. But all these lunatics were hidden and Carmena who was an old lady that seemed like a nice grandma she had been a judge well she seemed to be like a more of a moderate so a lot of people fell into that yeah she and had this sort of attractive grandmotherly way and as Diego says and he's absolutely right it sort of moderated the far left image of Podemos which is very hard left very hard left her most hardcore the the most ideological member of her government Carlos Sanchez Mato who was the local minister of economics ran as a candidate in 2019 and openly defended everything that had been in disguise when she became mayor he got 2% of the vote. So that is how unpopular these ideas would have been if they had been presented and if Madrillian had probably resisted the temptation of you know maybe supporting this so-called neighbor's platform that was indeed a political operation by the far left so so the challenge here was how do you defend a Madrid which is open you know all the characters of Madrid we've talked about are land of opportunities open society identity when you have a far left mayor in Madrid you know that that was the challenge.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:42

How do you confront this and I remember one day there was an election in the middle and I was at a polling booth and someone came up to me and he said thank you for defending us and he left and I thought well interesting our voters they have their clear understanding is that our job in front of Carmena is to defend them against the policies which are so aggressive and so anti-private property and so on that they're trying to implement.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:13

So our job was to make it as difficult as possible for her to apply her policies that would have destroyed the identity of Madrid as it is I was there with you on the first session of the new legislature when she became mayor when uh the lead the members of the local council left the building you were physically harassed by supporters of the Communist Party. There's a picture you can see me on the background I was also friends with the leader of Ciudadanos at the local level Begonia Villaz I had interviewed her before and she is kind of a neighbor to me so we've known each other for many years and PP then later formed government with her she was easy to work with in on that sense she's out of politics today she's leading the data centers association in in in Spain. Begonia was also harassed Begoñ was pregnant at the time so it's a very nasty image of course Esperanza was harassed too physically pushed around so there was violence against them. No they this was their day of celebration they had just taken the mayor's office and they were physically harassing you this is the far left mentality this was the Madrid City Hall was the most important administration they were going to run in all of Spain.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:26

This was their crown jewel so to speak and what came out was their profoundest violent behavior. We're going to intimidate you we're going to harass you because we're the ones who are going to apply our policies now and we're gonna put you behind. And this links to something else we've been talking about before the importance not to let the far left intimidate you and not to let the violence impose itself because that is their natural tendency. And it's only if you put a resistance towards them that you have any chance of surviving because they'll run you over. This is their basic thinking the far left is here when they have an administration to run over any political opposition. So everything we did all the initiatives we had and so on was to show them that we were not going to let them run us over that we were gonna be proud members of Madrid proud members of the center right defending our ideas and not being intimidated by the far left.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:25

I decided to start covering local politics then as a journalist I left my hat as an economic analyst and I became concerned with local politics. I saw how significant and symbolic this was for the Madrid model some people would have said that was beneath me because I would normally write about national economic affairs but I spent four years side by side with you guys. I am so proud of the work that everyone did each of us on our own responsibilities.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:50

One of the articles I'm remembering you wrote was when this minute well what he was the responsible for economics and finance he said that in the Russian Revolution only three people had been killed. Three or four I don't think four people you know he was a hardline communist and and I don't remember why we had a debate on the Russian Revolution 1917 and so his argument to defend because he was celebrating it. I don't know it was the anniversary and he was celebrating the Russian revolution and so in one of the debates we say you know this is one of the most horrible terrific regimes that ever was created in the history of the world the Russian communist regime and he defended it by saying now only three or four people were killed in the Russian Revolution.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:32

That's the type of people we had running things here in Madrid for I remember I was impressed because I attended I stopped attending so much but at first I was there at many of the sessions and I remember the current mayor I met him first on a day in which I was supposed to meet with Pertival with José Luis Moreno who had a fantastic work there on the opposition as well and Esperanza and then so she told me she like elbowed me and she told me listen to this one I brought him to I brought him from the regional government he's such he's got such a brain and he had a beard at this time so you wouldn't realize that now he didn't look exactly the same and it was current mayor Almeida who was a complete unknown local politics and it had really only been a month so I knew this was going to be hell but I just was not aware of all the bad they have done in just one month. And he started firing boy he was firing away and Almeida you've worked with him he's a state lawyer and avocado del estado so he can shoot and he can speak at uh 200 miles per hour and he just started shooting away so I was the first person to write about him on the press I didn't even quote his name because no one would have understood but I said one of Aguirre's members of local council something like this as a expression destroys mayor Carmena in less than five minutes. And that video went viral and still today I have a relationship with a mayor who is very nice to get along with except for football because he supports Atletico Madrid I support Real Madrid anyway he's a fun person to get along with and he's doing I think a very good work as a mayor but beyond that it shows how immediately there was so much to say about what they were doing. It was such a disgraceful local government that went from celebrate this sounds crazy but the Cato Institute is publishing this the English version of the book and they actually requested more information for example because they couldn't understand one passage of the book in which I explained that puppet shows meant for children were doing homage to Eta and Al-Qaeda so there was puppet shows for children celebrating terrorism that's the sort of intellectual engineering that was being placed on Madrillian society.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:42

Someone would hear this conversation and ask especially the first part of the conversation how could these people have won in Madrid how could they have got enough to government that's a very relevant question.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:57

There was a lot of frustration with traditional politics in Spain at the time no we'd gone through a very tough economic crisis people had they lost their houses there was a big property bubble that that exploded there was frustration with the traditional parties that happens there's something similar happening right now in in the rest of Europe with traditional parties in France or even in Britain.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:22

And people wanted something different something new and and these these far left parties they didn't present themselves as far left parties they were just it was the movement of the indignados it was yeah it emanates from the Occupy Wall Street the same spirit of occupy Wall Street you know people who are frustrated with politics as usual who wanted a change and this party sort of was in incarnated this spirit and and it worked for a few years until people saw who they really were and now they've been destroyed electorally but it was sort of the beginning of the wave that they caught very well I I've just run the I I've just run a quick calculation though it was 0.6% of the census that swung the vote into a uh in into the possibility of having a left wing government at the 0.6% of the it was very close of the electorate had voted for PP or ciudadanos or vox by the way this is another reason why they lost because they were split the center right was split in three also you didn't mention this but PP was going through a lot of corruption scandals at the time so that damaged their perspectives so 0.6% that is that kind of tells you all so they won they won large they were only one seat short but six comma 0.6% did make a difference.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:40

Unfortunately it did make a difference I'm curious about your now Diego brings up the split point I'm curious about your perception of the when the split started happening with the Vox what was the I guess the conversation you were going through within Pepe about what this would mean for Pepe at the time in Madrid I'm not sure you understand the question. It's like the reality split happening for these people are leaving Pepe for dissatisfaction reasons. How did you perceive that?

SPEAKER_01 1:42:15

Okay it was tough times I think the context to understand why this happened is one corruption had a big problem with corruption and and the right wing voters are very intolerant with corruption left wing voters tend to be less intolerant with corruption we're seeing that right now and in Spain there's a big problem with corruption in the left and you know and electorally the polls are not saying that they're gonna have a big problem. But in the right we had a big problem there was also the challenge of Catalunya there was part of the right in Spain who considered the government hadn't handled the referendum of independence in Catalunya correctly and also there was a sense that the Partido Popularian government hadn't defended its core values as it should have and so there were certain people who were more or whether more conservative or more liberal who decided that they wanted to change their vote and that they would look in other parties what they lost founding in finding in PP.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:22

And so that split the vote and the right split in three but did you expect those splits or those splinterings of PP to be so problematic Box didn't seem to become today's a very large party but when Box first ran for a European election it had a okay result but it didn't earn a single seat.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:46

So most people took for granted it would disappear that's very important first there were three parties now there's only two so the challenge was important but one of the parties basically disappeared the more the more liberal centre right which was centre right centre left. So right now the split is really between Box and PP. Now if you look at it on a European perspective PP isn't doing as bad as other centre right parties in Europe are doing in Britain Reform UK has the polls give them a better vote than the conservatives in France in France the Rassemblement national is doing better than the traditional in Italy to a certain extent Meloni has Forza Italia is PP and and it's a junior partner so basically it's only Germany and and even in Germany the the Democrats good the Christian Democrats are struggling governing now but the far right they have 20% of the vote or even more current polling 28% 20 28% I mean here Vox they're not gonna reach 20% they're around 18 19%. And even the last elections there's been in in Spain the regional government the regional elections Pepe has done pretty well so everything is relative in life of course but compared to other countries Pepe has endured better the challenge of a right wing populist party than other parts of Europe has done I mean it's still a challenge there's still a lot of frustration the immigrant discourse which of course I don't share but it's popular this idea of immigrants are a threat to our national identity and so on and forth so forth that has worked in certain parts of Spain. So there's the answer to your question is not as clear cut as it might be no of course there's been a challenge to Pepe but Pepe to a certain extent has managed it better than other parts of Europe has.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:36

Okay within center right parties yeah I think that there's another uh time in which you were ventured into national politics how did you get the call to be on the list who was the leader at the time it was okay so after after being in the national in the Madrid city politics I decided to leave politics for a while and to become a lawyer so I thought it was the end of politics.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:01

But then there there had been an internal election within Partido Popular Mariano Rajoy who was the prime minister at the time left there was an election and I supported the person who won who was Pablo Casal but I had a good relationship with him so even though I'd left you know I received certain calls you know why don't you continue helping out so on and so forth. And so I was a candidate for the elections there were two elections in 2019 the first one was in April the second was in November so I was a lawyer but I agreed to be a candidate in the election in 2019 knowing that I wouldn't be elected the political there's a closed list system your position on the list wasn't high enough in principle to be as nationalist nationalist to become a member of Congress a member of parliament no congressman member of parliament so I I agreed to be on the list knowing that I wouldn't be elected and so for a few years I continued to work as a lawyer but in 2022 we had a huge crisis within Partido Popular. The person I've been talking about Pablo Casado he was forced to leave the presidency of the Partido Popular and funnily enough the person who replaced him as an MP from Madrid was me. So Pablo Casado resigned as an MP from Madrid and the next one on the list was me. So I was a member of parliament until 2023 when I was a candidate again.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:30

Partido Popular thought we were going to win and to govern but it didn't happen and so I'm uh right now I'm two places from becoming an MP in so right now you could also if two other people leave I would become an MP interesting so Casado is an interesting figure because he worked with President Aznar for a very long time so he's very well trained in our ideas. And I think the general consensus is that he took over PP at a very low point in which it was falling below 20% and that he had been able to sort of stop a series of shenanigans and attempts by Ciudadanos to just do a complete hostile takeover of PP's space and he was able to actually shrink the popular vote for Ciudadanos and recoup most of that for PP. And then the general consensus I would say is that he screwed up because he decided to move against the Madrid governor Isabel Diaz Ayuso under guidance probably from one of his main counselors Teodoro Garcia with the paradox that Casado had been friends with Ayuso he chose her to be the candidate of Madrid so what was your take obviously I understand that you probably know Casado for a long time as well and so it's a similar situation to what many people have like most people that know Pablo Casado know Isabel Diaz Ayuso it's a nasty position to be in on a personal level.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:45

So yeah Pablo came from Madrid anyone who'd been in politics in Madrid for the past 20 25 years knew Pablo Casado and knew Isabel Diaz. We knew each other so I knew both of them of course I had a good relationship with them I supported Pablo Casado like Isabel did. She was part of the team that helped Pablo Casado become the president of PP.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:05

I did as well you and I were in a meeting with a certain senator also who was also promoting some uh actions uh so was economists like Daniel Lacalle who's uh been on Rishit's podcast before Pablo was trained in in free market thought and he and he was liberalism a very good choice he was the liberal uh choice he was the to a certain extent he was the anti-establishment choice because the other two main contenders were very establishment they've been right hand people to Mariano Rajoy by the way I I've never said this in public I I don't think Cospedal would have been a bad leader but that's a different conversation for another day but yeah casado one yeah so Casado one you know he was supported by a lot of people in Madrid I was one of them Isabel de Azoyuso was one of them and so personally I I have to confess that it was very tough and very emotionally disturbing to see how things ended up no because Pablo who had a great relationship

SPEAKER_01 1:50:00

Relationship with Isabel chose her when she was absolutely unknown to become the candidate of Partido Populare in the region of Madrid. She governed by a very short margin. She had to have the support of Ciudadanos and Box. So it was very close. She ended up being a great leader, and they rifted. They rifted for some reason that probably only they themselves know. And so to be a witness to a very tough relationship and an even war between the two of them was hard. I mean, emotionally for people who were close to them, it was very tough. And it ended up in the worst possible way for Pablo Casado. The party basically went up in arms against him and he had to resign, and his team had to resign. And it's very ironic that he was the person who chose for me to be replaced.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:51

And I replaced him in Congress. Today he's doing a career in investment, and of course, he's thriving as the leader of Madrid. But this is telling us to when uh Rashid, for example, questions you about the status of PP right now. I would say PP is not doing that bad considering it went through civil war twice in the last five years because, or six, because when Rajoy was replaced for Golden.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:15

The first one, I wouldn't say that was a civil war. I mean, yeah, anybody can have an opinion. I think it was a tough election, but it was an election and it was organized as such. I mean, you had different people who wanted to replace Rajoy. But blood did not, there was no blood, but and the anti-establishment one won. If you think about it, it's very surprising that the guy who didn't have the support of the main any of the two large families of the party won.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:46

Why do you think that happened, given it was so unaffected?

SPEAKER_01 1:51:51

I think there was the differences between the two main contenders were so strong that one of them lost in the initial pallot. Exactly. So you had two votes. First one, in the first one, only two passed. And so you had only that went from the second round, they went from the case. So the one who didn't pass the second uh to the second poll supported Pablo Casado because their relationship with the other one was so tough that they didn't want to see her win.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:22

And by the way, Soraya was the representative of the government of Rajoy, which had moved on the social democratic spectrum a lot, whereas Cospedal was the president of the party. So she was perhaps more connected to the pluralism within the party, more open to free market ideas. She had been a minister under Rajoy, but she had been a very good president in the region of Castilla-La Manch. So when they collided and a third party, sorry, a third candidate emerged, as Percival said, because he was able to get the masses, not the apparatus, but the masses.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:55

He was very fresh. He did a great campaign. He was a good speaker. He's a good very good speaker. He he he defended his ideas with a lot of freshness, with a lot of energy. And the other candidate was much more, how can I say, traditional? Um she was defined by government. She almost spoke like a minister, not as a politician. Like a manager, not a leader. Yeah, like an operative.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:20

So he was a great candidate, and he won, and he deserved to win. I followed that process while in Ecuador, and and I remember saying that what we really need is to win the first round. If we get to the first round, both ladies hate each other.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:33

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:34

So those that throw their weight behind one or another will support him by default because they don't want the other one to be the leader. So it was harder to get the first round than to actually win on the second round.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:44

You know, and at the beginning he had a huge wave of support and he did things well, and then he went losing that support little by little, and it ended up with his freshide competition with Isabel Diaz Ayuso in Madrid when they were both from Madrid. It was tough. It was really tough. And now we have a new leader. I think one of the great things he's done is he's pacified things within Partido Popular. There really was a very tough split within the party in 2022, and he's pacified that. This thing we were saying before of how urban and rural voters have different sensitivities. And Particular, to a large extent, is a rural party in certain parts of Spain, in Galicia, for example, or in parts of Andalucía as well. So he's managed to keep it together. And I think he would be a good prime minister. Manage Galicia well for 12 years. He has a lot of gravitas, he's an experienced manager. So we'll see.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:45

We'll see when we have the elections in Spain. When we do have the elections in Spain, what do you think would happen, at least right now? Because the polls say that there will be a large majority for the center, right? But there's Pedro Sanchez. Pedro Sanchez is unknown.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:02

Contrary to Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell, I don't trust Pedro Sanchez. He's capable of anything. He's within his own party, it has emerged in the past few weeks that he did all sorts of He stole the primary election, for God's sake, in inside his own party.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:18

Exactly. Of terrible things within his party to make sure he won. But the recordings of that meeting, which are private, were just released a few days ago. And it's you see them cry. There's leaders of the party crying. You can see people moving the polling booth, just openly stealing the election.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:35

It's the guy has no scruples at all, zero, and he'll do anything because he thinks he's it's justified for him to do whatever it takes to make sure the right doesn't govern in Spain. So he has no scruples. He will do anything that allows him to win. So we have to be very alert to his initiatives. There's a law that has allowed for lots of people to acquire the Spanish nationality in the past few years. This was done with a political idea. What has happened is basically grandchildren of exiled people during the Spanish Civil War have been given the opportunity to become Spanish. This has been done evidently for political benefit of the government because they tend to think that since they are a family of people who had to exile from Spain for political reasons, they are primarily left-wing and they will tend to vote for the left. So that has to be proven. That I have more doubts about. Yes. Because it'll take a longer time for them to vote. But in the short term, this there we're talking about two and a half million people who are going to acquire the Spanish nationality in a short term.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:54

The idea being I give you citizenship and a passage value.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:58

Two and a half million? Two and a half million.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:00

There are two and a half million who have asked for the Spanish nationality in the because of this. And it allows for grandchildren of exiles to ask for the Spanish nationality. Now, because bureaucracy is so slow, there's two and a half million who've asked for it, but I think the number is less than a million who've actually acquired it. But the rate of people who are not acquiring the nationality is very low. I think it's only 7% of all those who ask for it who don't acquire it. So you're gonna have suddenly hundreds of thousands of Argentinians who are going to be able to vote in Spanish national elections. That's we'll see the effect of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:42

A big swing on the census, but the idea here being obviously I give you papers, you may give me your vote.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:46

It's a similar thing that Maloney went against in Italy last year, essentially because he meant he tightened the ability for grandchildren in Arlatina and so on to get to acquire Italian citizenship. But now we go on the opposite direction, we make it more easy to get the first thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:02

Yeah, but why? Because he thinks he's gonna benefit anything Pedro Sánchez does is with a political intention benefiting him. So you can be sure that he thinks that these people, I insist, who are family of people who are probably left-wing, that they're going to vote for the left in Spain.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:21

Okay. So closing towards the end of the conversation, Diego.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:26

Wrap this up.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:27

Well and if a final question, they have a final question too, but yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:31

Yeah, well, I think we've covered enough ground, and I'm very thankful for the time we've we've spent here talking to you, Percival. And uh I think if you want to give us some final thought, there your manifesto or your book is called Pisando Charcos, Stepping in Puddles, right? One thing one tends to assume that these days many politicians want to keep their suit clean, don't really want to do very complicated things, that ends up giving, for example, our ideas a bad name. Because there's a lot of people who champion free markets or free societies, but when they're in governance, they don't do much. Sometimes when I think of everything you did as a finance minister in Madrid, and then I realized it was not that much time, it wasn't even two full years. You really took that assignment uh to heart and made sure you actually changed things. And then you titled your book like that, Pisando Charcos, stepping in puddles, right? Yeah, willing to get your hands dirty in a way. What's your call to anyone? There's a lot of people who are interested in politics and follow our podcast. And I guess you can share one final message about how important is it to be in politics for something and to commit to real change and real values being put into action, not just uh position that you may hold.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:44

I think this idea of reform as a principal reason for being in politics, it's made easier when it comes accompanied, which happens in my case, by another fundamental idea, which is the fear of power. I can perfectly understand that uh the uh the largest uh percentage of people who are attracted by politics are attracted by power, and their motivation to be in politics is to exercise power. Now, for reasons which I really don't know, but it's just visceral in my case, the power I tend to see with uh with fear, with or at least with respect. And uh so if you are to wield power for the shortest time possible, it's good that you uh uh take the time to wield it in the best possible way. So the motivation is not to wield power, but to use power for something else, to approve those reforms. And I think one of the basic ideas, or at least in my opinion, the basic idea of liberalism is that power corrupts. And power corrupts not in the sense that you put money into your pocket, which might happen as well, but uh in the sense that power tends to the abuse of power, and that power becomes an end in itself. And the power is the reason uh disguised or not disguised, but it's the only reason to stay in politics. And I fundamentally think that it's best not to do that. That power has to be a means and that it has to be exercised in a certain way, uh, just like fire. No, that fire burns, and if you're not careful with fire, it will burn you. But you can use fire to do certain things, for example, to cook and to feed yourself. So power is very similar. Power is very dangerous, you have to use it with a lot of caution. You can do certain good things with it, but you always have to remember that it can burn you and that it could maim you. Use your time in politics to do reforms, thinking that power, if you wield it too long, can be can be bad for your health.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:48

Let me ask you some quick questions. What does Pertellon Manglano listen to when he's playing some music? Woof. Oh, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:55

Well, rock and roll, funk, even some very left-wing groups, Rage Against the Machine, which is politically the worst, the worst group in the world. Their music is absolutely excellent. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac as well. But 70s and 80s, rock, funk, James Brown, of course, Bruce Springsting. You play an instrument? I used to play the drums. The drums, yeah. Since I became a father, I don't play the drums anymore.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:21

Uh favorite painting or painter.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:24

I go to the Prado a lot lately. I live close by to the Prado, and I'm trying to instill the love of painting to my children. I don't have a favorite painter really. Period? Probably 16th and 17th century uh Spain, you know, Velázquez and before Velázquez. It's also because of the importance of Spain, the building of the Spanish golden age, as we say here.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:45

We were having breakfast before coming uh in for the podcast, and we were speaking about how the enlightenment years of Spain are often silenced when there is a discussion of great civilizations, and that really uh bothers us. Favorite book, fiction or author? Probably the dangerous liaisons of Codello de la Croix. And what about non-fiction authors that you would recommend for political or philosophical thinking? You can name a few.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:11

Hayek, of course, uh that's the first one that comes to mind. Bastia, Frederick Bastia, because of his sense of humor. When I was writing my book, Pisando Charcos, I was reading a lot of Bastia, and I and that's what inspired me. I aspired to write with humor and with entertainment purposes. And in my political career as well, you know, when we were doing opposition to the communists here, a basic idea is that communists do not have a sense of humor. And if you use humor against them, they get lost. They don't know what to do. They're so full of themselves, they don't know what humor is.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:44

I was going to ask you about your tweets, uh, which were notarily very funny and always bugged the mayor and being ironic and so on.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:53

So humor is basic. So Bastiaff to me is a reference in that. And who else? And to make something more fun, I'm a big fan of the Jack Reacher series. You know, you know, uh this idea of you know, he's sort of a modern day Don Quixote who actually does things. You know, Don Quixote was crazy, but Jack Reacher is not crazy, and he defends the weak. He's a he's a modern day um uh uh caballero, no? Knight. A knight, modern day knight, and he defends people, so and I enjoy them very much.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:24

Places to visit in Spain that probably our international audience is not aware of. Of course, Madrid, they'll come to Madrid, but tell them something a secret, Jam, a town or a medium-sized uh city, or I'm a big fan of the Paradores in Spain.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:38

There are these historic hotels that are government-run. They run, they're excellent places, they're castles. I'm a big fan of visiting castles, and Spain, of course, is is one of the one. One of the ones I was gonna say to be able to live or to sleep in a 16th or 17th century castle is there's one of the few places in Spain in Europe that you can do that, and that's Spain in the Paradores. Sigüenza is another fantastic parador. Uh Tordesillas is not as beautiful, but the city is very beautiful. Uh Almagro, Jaén, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:18

The province of Jaen has fit hidden gems, and many of the people listening to a podcast, if they plan to visit Spain, they surely may not consider Ubeda or Baeta the land of good olive oil, and these places are fantastic. Finally, film and TV shows that you watch whenever you're turning on the uh the TV.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:36

I'm a big fan of non-intellectual films, and and I say this with full intellectual honesty. I like films that entertain. So I like films where there's someone who A Tom Cruise action movies. Exactly. Or or you know, someone who's been aggrieved, and as a person, he defends his own rights and he and he, you know, and he defends his rights. Like John Wick. Uh John Wick, exactly. Sounds like a Liam Nissan movie. Or these what's it called? The Denzel Washington's ones and the three ones. Even Sylvester Stallone, I admi I admire him. People make fun of him, but he's someone who's built a whole career out of entertaining and defending right-wing ideas. There's not a single Sylvester Stallone film which is woke or which is left-wing thinking. He's managed to defeat Hollywood at its own game. I I find it admiring.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:23

It could be similar for Clint Eastwood. It's similar to Clinton.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:25

Oh, yeah, that's what I mean. But those would be more elegated. But in in pure entertainment uh, you know, ideas, Stallone is someone to be admired.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:36

I didn't expect the similar system, but that's an interesting answer. And I do get your point. And finally, TV shows, uh, TV series. I don't watch a lot of TV stores. You're a films guy.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:44

No, yeah. Watch the last one I watched was Succession, which I found you know funny. It actually was pretty funny.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:50

It is actually funny and and and good. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:54

Debatable.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:54

Okay. Let's jump on the bottom. The funniest film I've watched I think is The Wolf of Wall Street. I found that extremely funny. I really I don't laugh at films, but in The Wolf of Wall Street, I really laugh at the film.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:08

Which isn't a session film, and it doesn't, but it feels like hits different in terms of comedy. Excellent film. Really funny. Really, really funny. Tell us something people don't know about you that is a bit embarrassing, a guilty pleasure that you have that people would be surprised to know.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:21

Oof. I I like being with my children. So that means not embarrassing.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:26

That's the best thing you could say.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:27

In the sense that I that's bad for my social life. There's the option of going out to dinner, and you know, it's very common in Spain. People go out for dinner a lot and so on. And I find myself having a very inexistent social life after eight o'clock because I'm married late and I have young children, 11 and 6 years old. And so I'll spend my time with them and my wife, of course. So you you'll never find me in a restaurant in Madrid at 10 o'clock at night. Maybe it'd be better for me to do so, but I won't do that.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:57

Thank you, Percival. It was a treat. Rajid, you can wrap this one up.

SPEAKER_02 2:08:00

You had a discussion about power, and it reminds me of this quote from Robert Carroll, the famous biographer of Lyndon Johnson, where he mentioned that it's common to say that power corrupts, but he preferred to say power reveals. And I think through this conversation, we can see what power can reveal when a man has a very strong idea that are pro-liberal and pro-freedom. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:25

Thank you. That's a pleasure. I like that. Yeah, it reveals very often the worst part of our personality because power allows you to control yourself less. Because other people are going to have to put up with you no matter what, because you're the one who has the power. So, yes, I would agree with power reveals, but I don't think it's contradictory to power corrupts. I think it's just two different uh points of view of the same idea. But to me, that's a fundamental idea. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:51

We'll be here with another episode of the Somewhere Anywhere podcast very soon. Thanks for following us. Subscribe, and looking forward to our next episode and to many more to come.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:00

Yes. Until then, Diego.