Spain in the World

RJG

Spain in the World looks at Spain alongside Europe, Latin America, and the wider world, covering politics, markets, law, and tech. Each episode starts from a Spanish question and follows it outward, asking how incentives, institutions, and state capacity shape outcomes in Madrid, Brussels, and other capitals. The outlook is cosmopolitan, the method liberal, and the treatment of trade-offs unsentimental. Recorded in Madrid by Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sánchez de la Cruz.

  1. 5d ago

    Power is the Only Principle - PSOE (Part 3)

    Send us Fan Mail Pedro Sánchez only got into Congress in 2009 and 2013 because colleagues ahead of him on the PSOE list resigned, and in 2011 he was placed too low on the list to win a seat at all. A year after he came back as a substitute he was secretary general of the party. In October 2016 the party’s federal committee resigned all together to force him out, which had never happened before. Eight months later he had won the leadership back, and by June 2018 he was prime minister. He got there through the first successful motion of censure in Spanish democracy, without a seat in parliament and leading a group of only 84 members of parliament. In this last episode of our three-part series on the Spanish Socialist Party, Diego and I trace that path from deep in the back benches to Moncloa. We ask what it tells us about the man, about the party, and about the institutions he now controls. The timing matters. Sánchez has just called a snap general election for November, and the gap between how he is seen abroad and at home is wider than for almost any other European leader. As Tyler Cowen likes to say, context is that which is scarce. Foreign coverage sees a strong economy, a progressive leader, and a country still read with worn-out tropes through the Civil War. It rarely sees how Sánchez actually operates, and this episode tries to fill that gap. Sánchez’s method starts with something he understood about Spanish parties. A leader who goes over the heads of the party machine can take everything with the votes of fewer than 200,000 members, who are far more radical than the people who run the party day to day. In fact, he did it twice. The first time was in 2014, with the backing of Susana Díaz’s Andalusian federation. The second was in 2017, when he toured the country in a Peugeot 407 with José Luis Ábalos, Santos Cerdán and Koldo García. Then he rewrote the party statutes so that no committee could ever remove him again. The same reasoning took him into government with partners he had sworn off. These were Podemos, who he once said would keep him from sleeping at night, Bildu, the political heirs of ETA, and the Catalan separatists whose leader he had promised to bring back to stand trial. In the end he gave them an amnesty. We spend a good part of the episode on that amnesty and what it shows about the Spanish state. The law went to Congress as a proposición de ley (a bill introduced by parliamentary groups). That route skips the Consejo de Estado’s opinion and the impact assessments a government bill must carry. It passed with 177 votes after a Senate veto that can only delay a law. The Constitutional Court then upheld it six to four, and one of the six was Juan Carlos Campo, the former justice minister who had once said an amnesty would be unconstitutional. In our view the word we most associate with the Spanish Socialists is power. Spaniards often derogatively call the party la PSOE, in the feminine, instead of the correct el PSOE. Why? Because of la Mafia. It is said that the 1980s Alfonso Guerra promised that after the Socialists had governed, Spain would become unrecognisable even to the mother who bore her. Whatever happens in November, Sánchez has made that promise truer than Guerra could have imagined. Support the show

  2. Oct 8

    Tension is What Benefits Us - PSOE (Part 2)

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode we continue our history of the PSOE, the party that has governed Spain longer than any other. We open in Toulouse in 1974, where a party that has been in exile for almost forty years holds its thirteenth congress while Franco lies in a hospital bed. Two young Sevillians, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, take over an organisation funded by German social democrats and blessed in person by Mitterrand, Palme, Brandt and Michael Foot. Within five years González has stripped the word Marxism out of the party’s own doctrine, resigning the leadership to force the point and returning with almost ninety percent of the vote. In 1982 he wins 202 seats and the press calls it el rodillo, the steamroller. Then the other half of the story. Miguel Boyer’s liberalising reforms give way to the GAL death squads, the Filesa financing conviction, the Roldán case, and a Mr X nobody ever identified. Aznar arrives in 1996, González leaves in 1997, and after a brief interregnum under Almunia and Borrell the party hands itself to an unknown professor from León. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won an election nobody expected him to win, legislated same sex marriage and abortion, and rewrote how Spain is permitted to talk about its own civil war. The FAES think tank later counted eighty four separate occasions on which he denied there was an economic crisis, before unemployment reached twenty five percent and the constitution itself had to be amended. Our title comes from a hot mic on Cuatro in February 2008, when Zapatero told Iñaki Gabilondo that what suited them was for there to be tension. We finish in 2014, with a complete unknown named Pedro Sánchez. Support the show

  3. Aug 30

    We Shall Take It by Other Means - PSOE (Part 1)

    Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series Part 4 of 8 Every origin story worth telling has its incongruities, and the Spanish Socialist Party offers a particularly rich one. The first episode of this 3-part episode opens with a Bizet aria, a wall of Goya’s blackest paintings arriving at the Prado, and a founding manifesto proclaiming the war between two unequal and antagonistic classes. From these three artifacts the conversation reconstructs how a party born among Madrid café printers in 1879, with the husband of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura sitting at the table, grew over the following century into the organization that would claim to embody modern Spain itself. It is, Diego and Rasheed, insist, a story that cannot be told without the deep history surrounding it. So before the socialists do much of anything, we pass through the long and turbulent nineteenth century that produced them, the dynastic civil wars fought in the name of a pretender called Carlos, the glorious revolution that toppled Isabella II, the brief farce of an imported Italian king, and the conservative settlement that Antonio Cánovas del Castillo engineered to end the chaos. That settlement, the Restoration, ran on turnismo, a gentleman’s agreement by which liberals and conservatives simply traded power between themselves, and the hosts cannot resist noting how closely the complaint resembles the charge of bipartidismo leveled at the two large parties today. Support the show

  4. Jun 18

    Axel Kaiser on Chile, Power and the future of the Right

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  5. Jun 11

    Why Vox Wins: The Rise and Rise of Spain's New Right

    Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 3 of 8 Support the show

  6. Jun 4

    The Long Road Back: Spain’s Popular Party (PP) — Part 2

    Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8 The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid's commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Union has ever suffered, larger than Paris or London, and yet curiously less fixed in the international memory. We try to hold two things at once here: the human tragedy of 11M, mourned every year much as the United States mourns its own September date, and the political rupture that followed it.  In 72 hours an electorate that was set to re-elect a government turned and removed it. How much of that swing was authentic moral revulsion at a governing party that had first blamed ETA, and how much was a coordinated campaign to pin the dead of Atocha on Aznar's alignment with Washington, is the question we sit with rather than resolve. What is not in dispute is that the left learned something that morning about the uses of the streets, and that the school of Zapatero was founded in those three days. From there the episode becomes, in large part, an extended meditation on a single man and a single temperament. Mariano Rajoy governed the Spanish right for fourteen years, from the shock of 2004 to the no-confidence vote of 2018, and we make the case that his defining gift and his defining flaw were the same thing: a genius for staying still. He won the largest victory in the party's history in 2011, one hundred and eighty-six seats, and yet that triumph rested on a collapsed Socialist government and twenty-five per cent unemployment rather than on any positive enthusiasm for him. The "technocrat" label, which in English flatters and in Spanish insults, captures the puzzle. We trace the ideological inconsistencies that hollowed out the party's credibility: opposition to same-sex marriage later quietly abandoned, a Historical Memory Law denounced in opposition and never repealed in power, tax cuts promised and thirty tax rises delivered. Whatever one's own position on each issue, the pattern corrodes trust, and trust, once spent, does not return. The Catalan crisis of 2017 is where we locate the real fracture. Faced with an illegal referendum staged with plastic ballot boxes, Rajoy reached for the judges and reached for Article 155 of the Constitution only after the fact, when the political moment had passed. It fell to King Felipe VI to give what was effectively a political speech, and to the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not the prime minister, to headline the great unity rally in the streets of Barcelona. Separatism has fallen since, but the lesson voters drew about their own government's passivity proved expensive. We argue this is the moment the big tent that Fraga built and Aznar perfected began to come apart, scattering its classical-liberal and conservative occupants toward Ciudadanos and Vox. The final part of the episode is a study in self-inflicted wounds. The Gürtel corruption affair was real but local, and the party's failure to defend the figures later acquitted of every charge.  Then came Pablo Casado, young, articulate, genuinely a man of ideas, who destroyed himself in 2022 by moving against Isabel Díaz Ayuso over allegations we find, having seen the dossier, remarkably thin. Which leaves the strangest fact in Spanish politics today, and the one we keep circling: the most popular figure on the Spanish right does not lead it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the overly-cautious Galician brought in as the adult in the room, has stabilised the party and brokered an uneasy coexistence with Vox, but excites no one. Ayuso, who may simply not want the job for reasons that are as much personal as strategic, remains the star.  We close on the party's own 2025 self-description, "centro reformista," a phrase that means precisely nothing, and on the road to 2027, where the only thing certain is that voters will be excitedly embracing PP but unambiguously signaling no more Sánchez. Next in the series: Vox. Support the show

  7. May 28

    Venezuela, Russia… Spain? Sovereign Immunity, Alter Egos & the Hunt for Assets

    Send us Fan Mail There is a tidy story we tell ourselves about who pays their debts. Rogue regimes and resource-rich autocracies default; mature European democracies, embedded in the rule of law and dependent on the confidence of the markets, do not. This episode is about what happens when that story breaks — when Spain, facing a wave of international arbitration awards arising from the retroactive cancellation of its clean-energy incentives, decides it would rather not pay, and finds itself the subject of frozen bank accounts and seized buildings across Europe. Our guest, Ashley Messick, has spent fifteen years in the unusual profession that exists precisely for this moment. She is the person investors, law firms, and corporations call when a state goes rogue: when an arbitral award has been won and the debtor simply refuses to honor it. Her work sits at the intersection of law, private intelligence, and political risk — asset tracing, cross-border enforcement, and the patient, adversarial craft of forcing a sovereign to the negotiating table. Support the show

  8. May 20

    The Race to Modernize Spain - The Popular Party (PP) — Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 1 of 8 Why does Spain's Partido Popular speak so many different political dialects at once — Madrid's free-market libertarianism, Galicia's institutional conservatism, the Christian democracy of its old guard — and yet remain the largest political party in Europe? In this opening installment of a new series on Spanish democracy, Diego and Rasheed argue that the answer lies not in incoherence but in DNA: PP is, and has always been, a coalition wearing the clothes of a party. The conversation moves from the death of Franco in 1975 through the engineered transition under King Juan Carlos, the founding of Alianza Popular by the formidable and unelectable Manuel Fraga, the collapse of the centrist UCD, the failed "Roca Operation" through which Catalan economic elites tried to manufacture an alternative center-right, and finally the 1989 Sevilla congress where Fraga surrendered the stage to a then-obscure regional president named José María Aznar. Along the way: why a brilliant Francoist minister who helped draft the 1978 Constitution could never win a national election; how Margaret Thatcher personally berated Fraga over Spain's vote on NATO; why the "Clan de Valladolid" outmaneuvered Fraga's preferred successor, the glamorous Isabel Tocino, in a weekend confrontation at his Galician fishing house; and the case for Aznar as perhaps the most consequential pro-liberty Western leader of the late twentieth century outside Reagan and Thatcher. Threaded through the narrative is a quieter argument about democratic self-restraint — Franco's regime dissolving itself into a constitutional monarchy, Fraga stepping aside despite holding the party in his hand, Aznar imposing his own two-term limit at the peak of his power and keeping the promise — set against the unraveling of those unwritten rules in contemporary Spanish politics. Part I closes on the eve of the 2004 election, with PP at its absolute majority and Mariano Rajoy chosen as Aznar's successor by a finger pointed across the cabinet table. Part II picks up with what happened three days before the vote. Support the show

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About

Spain in the World looks at Spain alongside Europe, Latin America, and the wider world, covering politics, markets, law, and tech. Each episode starts from a Spanish question and follows it outward, asking how incentives, institutions, and state capacity shape outcomes in Madrid, Brussels, and other capitals. The outlook is cosmopolitan, the method liberal, and the treatment of trade-offs unsentimental. Recorded in Madrid by Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sánchez de la Cruz.

Information

  • Creator
    RJG
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    24
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Spain in the World
  • Show Website
    Spain in the World

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