Ayuso, Rorschach and Gramsci
An essay on Spain's most misunderstood politician
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Rorschach Ayuso by Sarah Cocke is licensed under a CC BY 2.0 license. It is based on “(Isabel Díaz Ayuso) Reunión del Grupo Parlamentario Popular en la Asamblea de Madrid" by PP Comunidad de Madrid, which is licensed under CC BY 2.0; and Rorschach test red ink smoke by Leo Reynolds, which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the autonomous community of Madrid, is quite possibly the most controversial politician in Spain. What is strange about her is that any commentary on her policies or style will normally tell you just as much about the pundit as it does about the politician, if not more.
In other words, Ayuso acts as something like a Rorschach test for political geeks. These tests are a psychological tool that was developed in the 1920s and peaked in popularity in the 1960s. Inkblots with ambiguous shapes are shown and patients are meant to describe what they see. The tool was designed to to help psychologists identify deep feelings and thoughts that patients might not be fully aware of holding.
The test is all about projection - displacing your feelings and thoughts onto other people or objects. This approach has come under criticism from researchers in recent years, but it remains a good metaphor for the way political geeks project our own biases onto the leader of the Madrid region.
When I take Ayuso’s Rorschach test, we can see my bias towards what I describe as the two games of politics: winning elections and governing competently. Ayuso scores well in the first game. She has led the conservative Popular Party (PP) to three consecutive elections in the regional elections in Madrid. She came second in May 2019 with 30 seats (68 are needed for a majority), but was able to form a government with the support of a liberal party that is now struggling to survive and hard-right party Vox. She then more than doubled her support in May 2021, getting 65 seats. Vox voted to support her regional government after the vote. In May 2023, she went on to win an outright majority with 70 seats.
In terms of governing, Ayuso’s track record in attracting investment has been extraordinary. In December 2019, a few months after she entered power for the first time, Madrid overtook Barcelona (in Catalonia) as Spain’s leading regional economy. Ayuso was in the right place in the right time: the Catalan independence movement had been scaring off investors for a few years with populist, nativist and frankly misguided policies, powered more by groupthink than sound economic practice.
Since then, though, Ayuso has taken this free present from Catalonia’s short-sighted leaders and run with it. The autonomous community of Madrid now captures nearly 22.3% of the entire investment in Spain, despite only having 6.7% of the country’s population (compared to nearly 16% for Catalonia). Its share has grown 6.43 percentage points since 1995 as Catalonia has lost ground with investors, as have Andalucía and Valencia.
The vast majority of the investment in Madrid is private - Ayuso has slashed all the taxes within her control in order to attract business to the Spanish capital. Bringing Formula 1 to the region from 2026, when its contract in Catalonia expires, is the most high-profile example. The racing franchise will bring some €450m into Madrid over ten years. The region’s economy is now bigger than Rome’s and is within spitting distance of Berlin.
Madrid is also a startup hub, although it is not quite as successful on this score as Barcelona. Having said that, it is close enough to pick off business if members of the Catalan nationalist establishment once again declare themselves above the law.
Much of the money pouring into Madrid comes from Latin America - investment from the region into Spain as a whole has shot up 80% since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, Madrid’s foreign population has grown 20% since 2016, with many of the newcomers hailing from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. The Economist recently said that the city is “a growing rival to Miami” as the capital of Latin America.
Ayuso has gone out of her way to court the votes of Latin American immigrants to Madrid - more than 200,000 have the vote in regional elections. In March 2023, the regional president spoke at a rally for Latin American voters, claiming that they shared “a common past, one single culture and a future we can win together.”
There is a strong contrast between Ayuso’s immigration-friendly approach and Catalan nationalists in Barcelona, who have imposed regressive policies like “linguistic fines” on restaurants if their waiters struggle to reply to customers in the Catalan language. The rules deliberately penalise Spanish-speaking Latin American immigrants, who often want to start working in the service sector before coming to grips with the region’s minority language.
Abrasive persona
If you have read this far, it will be difficult to see why, exactly, Ayuso is so unpopular in some quarters. Her support has grown over three elections; and she won the last one with a landslide. She also governs much more competently than the leaders of Spain’s other autonomous communities, particularly those in Barcelona/Catalonia, Madrid’s eternal rival. What more can floating voters ask for?
Part of the reason that Ayuso is so controversial is to do with her personal style - she has developed an abrasive public persona. While not exactly a full populist herself, her public comments often have a populist edge to them. We have suggested before that Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister (PM), Pedro Sánchez, has become a left-wing populist after spending so much time working with populists of all stripes in his “Frankenstein alliance.” Ayuso’s frequent attacks on the PM often take her into dangerous territory, particularly when she implies that his lack of political capital means his government is an illegitimate one.
Another reason why Ayuso is a controversial figure is that she is often misunderstood and under-estimated by Spain’s patrician left. A journalism graduate, she first became regional president at the age of 40; and is still just 45. She is divorced and childless; she used to be in a relationship with a hairdresser; and one of her first jobs was a community manager for the dog of one of her predecessors as regional president. She has a visible Depeche Mode tattoo on her left arm. Her opponents often see her as a lightweight and misjudge their attacks as a result.
For example, the Socialists have been hit by a shocking corruption scandal, as discussed previously. In order to change the subject, the party’s leaders have led a sustained attack on Ayuso. It turns out that she started a relationship with a healthcare consultant in 2021 and now lives with him. He is facing tax investigations for the windfall profits he made sourcing protective material in 2020. There have been a series of leaks about his tax affairs.
Sadly for the Socialists, though, Ayuso is what boxing fans would call a counter-puncher (a tactical fighter who exploits mistakes to launch deadly counter-attacks). She fought back about the leaks. Why should she be responsible for her boyfriend’s tax affairs before she started going out with him? And should state officials have the right to leak the tax affairs of private citizens? She also claimed a moral victory when the tax authorities allegedly realised they had miscalculated and paid the consultant back more than half a million euros in mid-April (the exact details are unclear and disputed by both sides). Whatever the truth of the matter, the Madrid public, on the whole, is taking Ayuso’s side, as shown by her buoyant polling figures.
Meanwhile, the Spanish left often draws the wrong conclusion about Ayuso’s investment-friendly policies, accusing her of “fiscal dumping” and muttering darkly about banning it. Instead of such an old-school socialist complaint, it should be obvious to moderate social democrats that if a regional government can raise tax revenues with business-friendly policies, then the centre-left can play the same game too; and use additional income to support the welfare state and public infrastructure.
Hegemony
In order to understand why the Spanish left often misreads Ayuso so badly, we need to take a detour through the Italian prison system between 1926 and 1937. Antonio Gramsci was a communist critic of fascism. He was arrested under emergency laws passed by Benito Mussolini’s fascist government and eventually died of ill health and mistreatment at the age of 46. During his 11 years in prison, he filled more than 30 notebooks with insightful writings, which revolutionised Marxist (and post-Marxist) thought after his work was eventually published in 1947 after his death.
As we have said before, Karl Marx (the prophet of Marxist communism) had preached that a market-based economy would inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, ushering in a golden age of communism. This prophecy has a terrible track record. This poses a problem for convinced communists like Gramsci. Why is capitalism able to survive?
In classical Marxist ideology, the thoughts in our heads are said to derive from our economic circumstances. Members of the industrial working class allegedly have an incentive to become communist revolutionaries; while well-off members of society should allegedly defend their privileged positions. In practice, this model rarely works. Many working-class people are perfectly happy going about their lives without trying to change everything in society at once, while some of the best-known revolutionaries come from comfortable backgrounds.
During his long years in prison, Gramsci took a word long used by Marxist theorists, hegemony, and gave it his own spin. In his take, the concept refers to a set of ideas that allegedly benefit the interests of the ruling class, including folklore, popular culture and religion. He argued that Marxism needed to supersede people’s religious views by offering its own version of spirituality.
By putting ideas back into the frame and disengaging them from Marx’s materialism, Gramsci no doubt improved Marxism, despite the ideology’s failures to connect with reality at a fundamental level. He edged close to double-loop learning, but stopped short of completely reassessing his failed starting position.
Gramsci’s idea of hegemony provides a link to post-Marxist populist theories, which were developed by thinkers from Latin America. Political theorist Ernesto Laclau of Argentina took the idea of hegemony and ran with it as he developed a left-wing populist philosophy from the 1970s at the University of Essex in the UK. His ideas are based on the insight that a certain subset of people can declare themselves to be the true people and self-consciously build cultural hegemony over the rest of society.
We can get to a similar position to Gramsci without accepting Marxist premises - ideas really do matter; motivated reasoning is indeed a core part of our psychology; and packages of social norms, practices and ideas face evolutionary pressures. It is possible to take the concept of cultural hegemony and strip it of any Marxist or populist baggage. Doing so will help us better understand Ayuso and her critics.
Although Spanish nationalist dictator Francisco Franco won the Civil War in the 1930s and governed until his death in 1975, the progressive left has managed to gain a certain degree of hegemony over society in recent decades, often dominating the media, the education system and polite company. Progressive ideas are rarely attacked or criticised in respectable circles here, except by the headbangers of the populist right; and peripheral nationalists often like to claim to be progressives too (unconvincingly to me).
Communists often get a free pass in Spain due to a superficial reading of this side’s opposition to Franco from the 1930s. I am often surprised by how few people here have grappled with the failures of the Second Republic in the years before the Civil War; or how few have read George Orwell’s first-hand account of how communists suppressed anarchists and moderate socialists during the fighting.
As a result of this blind spot, Spain is the only country in the European Union (EU) where paid-up communists currently serve as ministers at a national level. This would be unthinkable in countries that suffered under communist dictatorships during much of the second half of the 20th century.
Ayuso is a counter-puncher, as mentioned above. She refuses to accept the hegemony of the progressive left or the social acceptability of communism in much of Spain, an approach that gets her close to the anti-”woke” rabbit holes we have discussed before without necessarily diving head-first into them.
In 2021, for example, Ayuso campaigned under the slogan “communism or liberty.” This bold and heavily simplified slogan provoked massive cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when faced with contradiction) in many committed leftists. Spain’s patrician left expects liberals, centrists and conservatives to cringe apologetically and many are taken aback by Ayuso’s lack of deference.
Populist-left leader (and communist) Pablo Iglesias, who is a fan of Gramsci and Laclau, took the bait in 2021. He resigned as Sánchez’s deputy PM to run against Ayuso in the regional elections with a view to stopping her cold.
However, Ayuso’s defiance of the left’s cultural hegemony has caught the imagination of many ordinary voters in Madrid. She thumped Iglesias by winning almost 45% of the vote - more than the three left-wing parties that ran against her put together. The former deputy PM limped into fifth place with just 7.2% and ten seats. It was effectively the end of his political career, although he is now seeking to reposition himself as a media commentator and maybe a mogul too.
Many left-leaning populists in Spain, including Iglesias, had long bought into conspiracy theories about the PP being some kind of fascist party, instead of sitting within the mainstream European centre-right. They misread Ayuso’s defence of investment, markets and modest taxes as fascistic, while completely missing her love of Latin American immigration. At the same time, they give a free pass to their own Catalan nationalist allies, who are genuinely troubled by immigration from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
Many of the immigrants from other Spanish-speaking countries, however, have their own reading of the Ayuso Rorschach test. More than once, I have seen the eyes of madrileños from Latin America light up when they have discussed the regional president. Having suffered under bad governments at home, they see her attacks on left-wing populism in an entirely different light from people who have never truly grappled with the many failures of communism or post-communist populism.
Healthcare
One of Ayuso’s most passionate opponents has been a hard-left anesthetist turned politician called Mónica García. She led a populist-left party called More Madrid into the 2021 and 2023 elections, coming second in both. She seems to take some of Ayuso’s more pugnacious views very personally and has been described as the regional president’s “nemesis” in the press. Her best result came last year, when her party got 18.4% of the vote - a long way off 47.3% for Ayuso’s PP.
The background to García’s duel with Ayuso came during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under PM Sánchez, the Spanish government was more paternalistic than many other European administrations. Many Spanish residents, myself included, grudgingly complied with 40 days without a walk, which Sánchez imposed with very little debate. The measure was much stricter than similar lockdowns in other European countries.
Ayuso, however, fought back. She used her regional power to push for different rules in Madrid from the rest of the country, particularly when it came to keeping bars and restaurants open, arguing that this would save jobs in the region. Although she irritated the public-health establishment, she avoided anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which are common on the hard right. Her defence of a relatively open economy during the pandemic won strong support among the region’s freelancers and small-business owners, helping her to solid victories in 2021 and 2023.
As a medical professional, García felt Ayuso was irresponsible during the pandemic; and strongly attacked many of her policies, which as we have said erred on the side of openness without breaking the overall consensus about the need for action. There is certainly a case to be made, particularly when it comes to decisions relating to care homes in Madrid, but the reality is a little more complicated than García would like.
Any judgement calls on the handling of the pandemic need to factor in the economy as well; and we should compare the results achieved by different administrations in an analytical way, while keeping our anger in check, so we have a better idea of what to do next time. García’s furious defence of the strictest possible lockdowns resonates with some voters, but is clearly not an election-winning platform.
As we come to the end of the essay, it is worth mentioning a point that readers outside Spain might find strange. Although Ayuso has some affinities with the hard (or populist) right and certainly has a populist edge to her discourse, it would be a mistake to assume she belongs to the populist side of the conservative movement.
It is much more sensible to see Ayuso as a defender of economic liberalism (an idea that was rarely expressed in Spain until she gained power - the PP has often had a strong interventionist streak). There are interesting parallels with Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, who can’t quite seem to decide whether he is an economically orthodox technocrat or a hard-right populist. Ayuso is more moderate than Milei when it comes to social issues, but we can see the same tension between orthodoxy and populism in her public persona.
Ayuso was comfortable receiving votes from hard-right party Vox between 2019 and 2023, but then hammered it in her third election (it came fourth and is basically irrelevant in Madrid now). She has stolen some of its positions, like saying that radical Basque separatist party Bildu should be banned - a line she has no way of enforcing as a regional baron with no real say in the governance of the Basque Country.
Despite her flirtation with Vox for several years, which irritated many on the left and troubled centrists, Ayuso is often surprisingly moderate for a counter-puncher who is interested in culture wars. We have already mentioned the way she courts the votes of immigrants as an example of an approach that would be unusual for the hard right.
In 2016, Ayuso voted in favour of an LGBT law in the Madrid regional parliament proposed by one of her predecessors, who is also from the PP. She later criticised the law for going too far; but then defended it again in a debate with Vox. She has said that Madrid’s Pride month lasts too long, while defending the city as an oasis of tolerance for LGBT people. She has also made it harder for teenagers who identify as trans to have easy access to hormones (a position that looks less controversial now in the light of the recent Cass Review in the UK, which concluded that these hormones should only be prescribed to young people with “extreme caution”).
Long a secular member of the centre-right, Ayuso returned to the Catholic faith of her childhood during the first phase of the pandemic, but rarely mentions her newfound religious sentiments in public.
Meanwhile, Ayuso might not be the most fervent environmentalist (to put it mildly), but she agrees with the need to fight climate change, albeit with superficial ideas like encouraging ordinary madrileños to put potted plants on the balconies of their flats. She is sceptical of apocalyptical environmentalism, accusing it of being a cover story for the failures of communism. Her over-simplified critique edges into conspiratorial territory, without quite becoming a climate denialist like Milei in Argentina.
When it comes to “culture war” issues, I see the best way of conceptualising Ayuso is as a politician who tries to push back against progressive over-reach and undermines the self-entitlement of self-identified progressive gurus. There is a subtle difference between this strategy and fighting progressivism from an openly reactionary perspective, as true members of the hard right tend to do. Left-leaning commentators and politicians, who find Ayuso’s style intensely irritating, often miss the distinction.
As we have seen with Sánchez, though, there are risks in staking out populist-adjacent positions. The politicians who do this can often become full populists in time, even if they don’t start out that way. This might well happen with Ayuso in the future, particularly given her tendencies to over-simplify complex issues and flirt with conspiracy theories about communist plots.
Also, the tax affairs of Ayuso’s current boyfriend (the healthcare consultant) are not the only corruption scandal to emerge in the Spanish press during her time in office, although so far nothing has stuck. Power corrupts, as regular readers know, and the PP has a poor track record on this front. Can Ayuso stay out of trouble? If she does, she would be a good bet to become Spanish PM in the years and decades ahead.
The PP’s current leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been dealt an excellent hand. If he fails to make the most of it, and Sánchez’s weak government hangs on, Ayuso would be a good bet to become the next leader of the centre-right opposition party at a national level. If this happens, she would have a chance to go head-to-head with Sánchez before August 2027, when the next general election is due. Her electoral track record at a regional level (two wins and one loss with 47.3% in her best result) is much better than his at a national level (two wins and three losses, while only breaking 30% once), so she would stand a good chance of becoming PM in this scenario.
The comments are closed, as always when we discuss populists of the left and right (who can be very annoying on the internet). If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week! Also, thanks to my Mum for the image at the top!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Understanding investment and the risks of Catalan independence
Startups in Barcelona and Madrid
Catalan nationalists and Spanish-speaking immigrants (part one, part two and part three)
Socialism and social democracy
The abyss stares back and some thoughts on legitimacy
The failure of Marxism and the fall of the Berlin Wall
The dangers of just one model and the risks of changing everything at once
Ideas matter, motivated reasoning and the evolution of social norms
The dangers of anti-”woke” rabbit holes (part one and part two)
Iglesias (part one and part two)
Spain is not a fascist state and crying wolf
Two enviromentalist movements and green liberalism
Further Reading
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas
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