How Madrid Became the Laboratory for Spanish Thatcherism
Over its 25-year rule in Madrid, the right-wing Partido Popular has given rise to vast webs of corruption, widespread privatizations, and a disastrous mishandling of COVID-19. But its Thatcherite revolution has also forged a new voter base loyal to the ruling party — meaning predictions of imminent collapse are likely premature.
President of the Community of Madrid from 2003 to 2012, the self-described “Iron Lady” Esperanza Aguirre (center) kept her friends in high places and her enemies on edge. (Wikimedia Commons)
An epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, the Community of Madrid has been the single Spanish region hit hardest by the pandemic. Today, the regional government faces the fallout from a nursing home scandal that saw at least six thousand sick elderly residents refused hospital treatment, abandoned, and left to die alone without care.
This owed much to the disastrous record of the Partido Popular (PP), the conservative party which has been in power in the Madrid region for some twenty-five years. The PP’s policies, heavily weighted toward privatization, left Madrid’s public health care system ill-equipped to battle the most severe humanitarian crisis to hit the country since the 1936 Civil War.
Some observers have speculated that the PP’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis in the Community of Madrid may threaten its quarter-century dominance of the region’s politics. Yet a closer look at the bases of PP control — and the electorate it has created through its Thatcherite measures — offers rather less reason for optimism.
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