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This article by Beñat Zaldua appeared in the August 23, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
When the Bjørnevatn iron ore mines closed in the inhospitable north of Norway, the town’s future was up in the air. How could 3,000 people live in the Arctic Circle? They could have left, of course, but one should never underestimate a community’s determination to inhabit its territory, regardless of economic considerations. The Norwegian state could have also maintained the mines using the national budget, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. Instead, it decided to locate the headquarters of the Compulsory Family Benefit Collector in this remote town.
This is how, explains Kjartan Fløgstad, “with rough hands and numb fingers, the laid-off miners bent over their computers and began hammering away at the keys in an attempt to track down defrauding parents so they could claim child benefits.”
Gloria Estefan, the ’80s throwback music industry mafiosa and daughter of a participant in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; will receive over half-a-million Euros for some sort of performance in Madrid.
The anecdote beautifully illustrates a country’s willingness to think and build itself as a whole, while keeping at bay the centralizing impulse that emerges in every center of power. And this is without being a truly federal system.
In Germany, with one of the most decentralized systems on the continent, the territorial division of power is a national sport. The government and Parliament are in Berlin, but the Constitutional Court is 700 kilometers away, in Karlsruhe, while economic power, headed by the European Central Bank, resides in Frankfurt. Berlin, by the way, barely represents 4 percent of Germans.
Germany has territorial imbalances, but these have more to do with the country’s history, divided in two for decades, and the accelerated process of reunification that followed, than with the tension between rural and urban areas, omnipresent in deeply centralized states like France.
In the middle, with an a priori decentralized system, lies Spain, a country that has stopped thinking about itself as a country. An entity in which the gap between the capital and the territory has widened, with consequences that are already being felt and that will transform the structure of the Spanish state. The scale of the fires ravaging Castile and León these days is not entirely unrelated to this phenomenon. Spain’s economic elites are now the economic elites of Madrid, whose focus of reflection and action is always Madrid, a city they aspire to position as a global capital. To achieve this, they argue that it must surpass the 10 million population barrier and bring together 20 percent of Spaniards (currently 7 million). In certain circles, this project already has a name: Madrid DF.
Madrid is the nest of Spanish Trumpism, the laboratory of the right wing.
The Mexican, and more broadly, Latin American, reference is not trivial, as the connection with the American continent is the springboard from which Madrid’s elites aspire to compete with Paris or London, replacing the role played for much of the 20th century by Miami. The arrival of Latin American elites and their investments in Madrid’s wealthiest neighborhoods confirms that this process is underway. The left has recently criticized the half-million euros that Madrid will pay for a Gloria Estefan concert to celebrate what in Spain is called Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Day)—that is, October 12th. It’s wasteful, of course, but it’s often forgotten that it’s part of a broader strategy.
Madrid’s commitment rests on several elements. One is geography: the city’s original wealth basically consists of extracting capital gains from inexhaustible developable land. Another is tax dumping: Madrid takes advantage of the partial decentralization of the state to keep its taxes to a minimum. Or yet another is its status as the capital, which allows it to attract a large portion of state investment and spending, thus offsetting a lower tax burden than the rest. These competitive advantages are compounded by structural decisions such as the high-speed rail line, which turn Madrid into a vacuum of people and businesses. This logic condemns the rest of the territories to being little more than sacrifice zones for tourism (the coast) or energy (the depopulated interior). This Madrid-style vision of the state is a human and ecological disaster.
Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, mayor of Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City, traveled to Madrid earlier this summer to meet Spanish ultra-right politicians and businesspeople, before returning to illegally remove two statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
This isn’t a uniquely Spanish case. There are many countries with vast capitals and weak territories at their service, but Madrid is unique. The city isn’t the refuge of the progressive vote against a conservative camp, as the cliché dictates. It is, in fact, the laboratory of the right, the nest of Spanish Trumpism, led by the president of the Community of Madrid and a countervailing power within the People’s Party (PP), Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The combination is lethal, because Ayuso receives the votes of Madrid’s victory, while the far-right Vox reaps the grievances of much of the rest of Spain. When the votes of Basques and Catalans are no longer sufficient to prop up a progressive government—which struggles to find a national project—territorial tensions will return to the Spanish state. But make no mistake, it will be Madrid that provokes them.
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The post Madrid Feigns Independence, to the Rhythm of Gloria Estefan appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.
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By Paul Haeder, August 23, 2025
This is a wide-ranging discussion of matters of peace and war.
The post AUDIO: David Swanson and Paul Haeder Discuss Peace and War appeared first on World BEYOND War.
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