Ayuso: from Thatcher's emula to Truss partner

If at some point Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the community of Madrid, had the dream, in the heat of the fight against the medical class and the toilets, of being the living reincarnation of the British premier Margaret Thatcher –heading more than three decades a long and victorious fight against the English miners, led by the feisty trade unionist Arthur Scargill and which opened the door to the dismantling of one of the most advanced welfare states in the developed world – has not taken long to accept that history is awarding the infinitely more modest and not at all brilliant role of a true copy of the unsuccessful Liz Truss, the short-lived Tory prime minister who crashed into reality as soon as she took office.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 November 2022 Saturday 17:37
6 Reads
Ayuso: from Thatcher's emula to Truss partner

If at some point Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the community of Madrid, had the dream, in the heat of the fight against the medical class and the toilets, of being the living reincarnation of the British premier Margaret Thatcher –heading more than three decades a long and victorious fight against the English miners, led by the feisty trade unionist Arthur Scargill and which opened the door to the dismantling of one of the most advanced welfare states in the developed world – has not taken long to accept that history is awarding the infinitely more modest and not at all brilliant role of a true copy of the unsuccessful Liz Truss, the short-lived Tory prime minister who crashed into reality as soon as she took office. This week, the Madrid leader had to admit her defeat, the first important one in her political career, just when she thought she was on the cusp of her assault on power in the State.

Until now, Madrid society seemed to have accepted the policies of Puerta del Sol with a paralyzing division. A combination of the Trumpist populism of Díaz Ayuso, with his superficial patina of authority and self-confidence without prejudice, apparently alien to class clichés, with the ultra-liberal practice of its regional government, personified by the Minister of Economy, Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, father of the seminal health privatization during the mandate of Esperanza Aguirre, when he was a minister of the sector for four years (2010-2014) and carried out voluminous cuts of expenses from which the first white tide was born. He now pilots the economic policy of minimum public spending and strangulation of the administration by the simple way of giving up as many taxes as possible.

But the latest health crisis has revealed the limitations of this social experiment and the displacement of income towards the sectors closest to the PP sector that surrounds the Madrid president. And although, certainly, it is not only in the Community of Madrid where the health system suffers very serious deficits, it is there where the privatization of the system has advanced the most and above all, as in no other, the long-suffering patients and users have had to endure over and over again the repeated speeches by their public officials announcing tax cuts thanks to the fact that things are going so well and everyone is richer.

The miscalculation has been serious. Díaz Ayuso has faced, and they have broken his face, with one of the most representative classes of the middle classes of advanced societies, the so-called medical class and with it the majority of health personnel. Incarnation of meritocracy par excellence and object of reverence for the entire social pyramid; much more than the financial executives that he is closest to and are much more visible and talkative, but who are barely a hundredth of the medical professionals. First he mistreated them, then he insulted and ignored them. He has opened a chasm with the trunk of middle-class society.

These few weeks that have shaken Madrid have destroyed the founding myth of Ayuso's political hegemony, as before Aguirre: that a satisfied and well-off majority lives in his community that lives sheltered from the cold of globalization. That he does not need public protection, he already has private healthcare and education and only dreams of a dwindling state, as Fernandez-Lasquetty explained to his students at his ultraliberal university in Guatemala.

The health strike and the massive protest demonstration a week ago deny that Madrid is the only territory on the planet where the middle classes do not suffer a process of impoverishment, the dark face of globalization in almost the entire planet.

Yesterday, on the pages of this newspaper, Celeste López drew a luminous portrait of one of the leading doctors in the protests against Ayuso. Surgeon Ángela Hernández, leader of the Madrid Association of Physicians and Graduates of Superiors (Amyts) union. Her life trajectory could be that of many residents in that community that with the beginning of the century saw itself storming the skies of economic prosperity. Hernández reveals that "in Barcelona I sympathized with Ciudadanos and in Madrid with UPyD", far from the Manichean stereotype of a pro-communist drawn by Ayuso. In fact, Dr. Hernández is the general secretary of a union of the so-called corporatists, far from the so-called class, the latter traditionally associated with left-wing parties and who condemn the former as yellow. Amyts is a union of professionals focused on union demands.

A professional who identified with the political forces that at one point considered moderating the hegemony of the two classic parties, the PSOE and the PP. It was the phase of the growth of aspirational middle classes scattered around the Urban Action Plans (Pau) that outlined a new metropolitan area and suffered with the end of the housing bubble. The offer from Aguirre, first, and Ayuso, later, finally seduced them with appeals to an individualism that was projected from the individual home and the flight from the condition of a simple wage earner. Always with messages against taxes and the State, far from the use of public services.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Ayuso's blow on the health front coincided with the worst moment of Donald Trump, undoubtedly one of his references to his political behavior. The limitations that have been exposed in the North American elections are also discovered in the political crisis in Madrid. The image that is now taking shape of the Madrid president quickly mutates from that of the pure-blooded Thatcher aspirant, bearer of the new ultra-liberal recipes for the Spanish right, to that of an irresponsible and unconscious Truss.