Díaz Ayuso and the metropolitan vector
“La Comunidad de Madrid vuelve a teñirse de azul”. This was the recurrent metaphor in the attempt to capture Díaz Ayuso’s unprecedented victory in the Spanish regional elections; a victory that has surpassed her own threshold in the 2021 elections. The map above crystallizes the integral hegemony of the PP in Madrid, going as far as winning traditional PSOE territories like Fuenlabrada, where a very young PP candidate ran on a platform of security and police expansion [1]. There are good reasons to think that these results for the conservative party is a direct consequence of the exhaustion of the Sánchez’s coalition given its multiple legislative and internal political clashes. However, there is also Díaz Ayuso’s factor in the current territorial map that has become possible to evade. A first impression: the watershed victory demonstrates that Díaz Ayuso’s political leadership was not dependent on the pandemic restrictions and polarization of the 2020-2021 cycle. Her combination of administrative and populist style has already unleashed a profound renovation in the Spanish political right. Yes, a renovation of the ideals of Aznarismo, which combines quite harmoniously territorial centralization and liberal economic principles with heavy footing on the Atlantic American alliance. All of this is in the discussion, no doubt, but it is still too abstract and it fails to give us the strong contours of Díaz Ayuso.
In any case, there is still time to see if there is political and institutional endurance from Díaz Ayuso, or whether she is a “ready-made product” of the political culture of Madrid. My sense is that she has a long rung in the Spanish right, and that her style is paving something like a structure of stabilizing a robust administrative center-right governance in the Spanish political landscape. This is something that was more difficult (if not impossible) in Pablo Casado’s hasty and improvised political style five years ago, which became inadequate for the post-populist cycle of social demobilization. Unlike Casado’s abstract political opposition, Díaz Ayuso has been able to craft her opposition from the ground up, and this means something very concrete territorially: the management of Madrid as a metropolis. This is the key that can only explain her motto “Madrid es España”, a metonymic tenor that reinforces the combination between economic development, global cosmopolitanism, and territorial hegemony at a coordinated pace. To govern a metropolis does not just mean to preside over an urban space, but rather to engineer a territorial hub into an administrative and spatial multilevel governance to attenuate its relation with heterogeneous social and economic forces.
The logistics required by governance should not be reduced to multicultural convivencia. This is why the comparison between Madrid and Miami (suggested by Máriam Bascuñán in the wake of the electoral results, adopting and extending FT correspondent Simon Kuper’s demographic analogy) rings true when framed as a culturalist analogy, but loses grip when it comes to explaining the politics of metropolitan administration. First of all, Miami is not a metropolitan center nor a financial hub for those ‘south of the border’; rather, it is more of a neoliberal locality amplified by Latin American economic elites' insolvent ideological rhetoric (meanwhile, the local economy is extremely squalid and improductive with a historic sector in the informal economy). Secondly, unlike Madrid, Miami is far from being an administrative stronghold, as is the case for the massive public bureaucratic spending of the Spanish community, as recorded here recently. Thirdly, Miami does not project itself as a cosmopolitan hub, even less so in the aftermath of depredatory illegal migration policing and reporting in Ron DeSantis’ legislation; whereas, Díaz Ayuso’s Madrid the cosmopolitan element has become an insignia of the metropolitan aspiration.
In fact, I was struck when I recently heard Díaz Ayuso claiming that Madrid has become an epicenter for “Latinamericans” that, unlike Miami [sic], it offers higher incentives for social benefits and protections to its new residents. Taken symptomatically, the contrast established by Díaz Ayuso between Madrid/Miami provides the framework for the essence of the administrative metropolis, which is not at all divorced from the effective force of social reproduction. The territorial design of metropolitan governance fundamentally entails that spatial, fiscal, and social levels of administrative capacities are able to allow flexible relations between transnational finance, the distribution of social goods, and infrastructure maintenence. In other words, metropolitan management does not imply the intensification of a libertarian ideal of absolute privatization, but rather an updated and more efficacious design of neoliberal governmentality (that seeks to govern for each and everyone, omnes et singulatim) in order to integrate social administrative capacities as a monolithic vectorization. Obviously, this entails the liquidation of modern representational politics that, already in the 1940s, Max Horkheimer understood as being increasingly replaced by the general apparatus of governance. Today this apparatus is no other than the administrative regulations over the social. This is what Horkheimer wrote in the fragment of 1942 on the ideology of the political:
“Government, however, must bow to the same necessities as buying and selling: to the requirements of the reproduction of society within the power relationships as they are. [...] Today the struggles take place within much stronger groups, amid movements of highly concentrated masses of capital. The governments are executive mechanisms which cannot rationally understand the actual state of the force on which they depend, but merely feel their concrete effects” [2].
The metropolis is the spatial organization that governs and distributes those effects through an array of compensatory tools and capabilities. Politics comes only second, and the politician is handed out to the manager. Horkheimer could not have foreseen the stealth integration of the forces of valorization into the executive force of administrative applicability. Broadly speaking, we can define metropolitan management as the executive distribution of strategies, forces of containment, and maintenence of the circulation of value (local and global as mutually intertwined) within a highly delimited space of social reproduction and connectivity. In this sense, rising the question of the metropolis allows us to see that the now defunct paradigm of a self-sufficient and exceptional region - at times understood as “critical regionalism” as an updated version of the old ‘socialism in one state’ - is truly the highest effect of planetary globalization, which can only be taken as face value given the persistence of the illusion of the autonomy of the social. That is to say, the metropolitan dominium does not abandon the “social question”, far from it; it rather integrates more dynamically and productively, hypostatizing the collapse of politics into the spatial necessity of social reproduction. The dose of novelty in Díaz Ayuso’s unique political fresco is to be found in her avid capacity to yield stability in the passage from representational politics into the entropic and optimal composition of the metropolitan vector as a new form of postliberal dominance.
Notes
1. Electoral Map from El Mundo data cartography, May 29, 2023 : https://elmundodata.carto.com/builder/1a1930b1-a656-4164-9f90-3f13c52e9c2e
2. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002), 234-235.