Below is a transcript of a speech delivered by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the President of the Community of Madrid, at the ‘Remaking Conservatism’ Margaret Thatcher Conference hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies on March 17, 2025.
For these last few years, first as a candidate and then as regional President for the Partido Popular, I have advocated for the need of our centre-right party – the People’s Party – to become the ‘casa común’, the ‘common house’ of conservatives, liberals and all those who believe in freedom, prosperity and respect for human life, who love Spain, the West and the rule of law. Something similar to the ‘common ground’ proposed by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph.
Today, I intend to talk to you about the core of ideas around which we are building this project in Madrid: el liberalismo a la española. (Liberalism, the Spanish way.)
‘How did we get here?’ This was the question I asked publicly a few years ago, seeing the rise of the far Left, the ‘Argentinisation’ of Spanish politics and the decline of liberal democracy.
‘Listen to us: we come from the future’, our friends from Hispanic America used to tell us, as they were fleeing their countries, where socialism and demagogy had stolen their freedom, prosperity and, ultimately, their own country.
Since then, I have denounced what I called the ‘woodworm strategy’: Spain’s socialist Government and its communist and separatist partners have been colonising institutions, universities, primary and secondary education, the media, public companies and the boards of directors of private companies. They have appointed political commissars, they have spread everywhere their manipulation of language and reality.
We had to start to speak up, to give people back their hope, their faith in Spain, in their own personal projects and in the future. To denounce every abuse, every lie, every trap, and offer a common project everyone could join.
So that we could give the best version of ourselves – a way of seeing life that is free, joyful, and courageous.
That way of seeing life is the Spanish-style liberalism that I defend and put into practice. It may surprise some, but the term ‘liberal’ was born in Spain. That is why in English it sounds so similar to the Spanish word, ‘líberal’. The problem is that then the term liberal has not been very lucky in the English language: sometimes it has lost its true meaning. It even means two different things on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the US, it means something similar to ‘progressive’, or ‘left wing’.
Here, in Great Britain, ‘liberal’ also means several different things. But above all it means ‘economic liberalism’.
And, in moral and social terms, being liberal in Great Britain is to believe in ‘the individual’, in maximising each one’s utility and being in favour of abortion, euthanasia or the legalisation of drugs.
Can you see the problem? This so-called ‘economic liberalism’ is dissociated from the ‘political’ one, and, suddenly, they seem incompatible. What has happened? Can Spanish liberalism overcome this gap?
It is essential that the term ‘liberal’ is associated again with the word ‘truth’. The conviction that ‘the truth will set you free’ is, after all, one of the founding slogans of the modern West. Yet liberalism has been distorted.
That is why I come today to vindicate Spanish liberalism. It is a school that has been forged over centuries, and that today, in Madrid, we are making a reality. For Cervantes himself, being liberal meant being brave and generous. It means forging one’s own fortune.
One could give up one’s life and property, but never freedom or honour: because they belong to each person by the mere fact of having been born, in any part of the world, with or without money, in any social rank, because we are all children of God. This gives us something essential: free will.
These values are at the core of Spanish identity. In fact, these were the values on which Christendom was built, which was the first building block of the West.
And these concepts contain the keys to understanding what it means to be liberal in the Spanish way – that freedom, responsibility, courage and truth are inseparable. And that they are one’s personal mission, and crucially, the mission of history.
A great Spanish doctor, intellectual and politician, Gregorio Marañón, said that being liberal means living according to a double principle: being willing to reach an understanding with those who think differently; and that the end never justifies the means.
That is why the liberal believes in the law: our admirable Spanish transition, from dictatorship to democracy, was made ‘from the law to the law and through the law’. The liberal believes in the constitution, which is the ‘law of laws’. In the rule of law, in legal certainty and in the separation of powers.
We defend ‘legitimacy’, which is the ultimate justification for doing something. That personal life is much more important than political life, that politics must always be at the service of the person and not the other way around.
These principles were born in the West. It is through this lens that we can appreciate the value of Greece and Rome, and of Judeo-Christian and Germanic cultures. This way of seeing life is one that Spain has defended for centuries, even on its own soil; the one we took to the New World.
Our history supports our claim: from the Courts of León, the first ones in the world, in 1188; to the Council of Trent, which declared that Indians were human beings; the Laws of the Indies, the first code of human rights in History; the Courts of Cádiz, of 1812 and the liberal Constitution; the Spanish transition.
Liberalism is the political articulation of freedom, and this is achieved through the law. That is essential to liberalism. Because for liberals, it is vital to find reason, to seek the truth. To convince and not to manipulate.
Today, the world is full of those who want to do everything without any regard for consequences. Fed up with woke policies, which were nothing but another disguise of communism, we should not forget that we, as liberals, conservatives and others on the center-right, must have the rule of law and respect for institutions as our compass.
If we engage in demagogy, fuel civil war, lie, appeal to feelings, to fear or cease to speak clearly, we will have become like them, like those whose ideas we fight.
Let us not forget that we defend an amazing project that defends the best that we have achieved over many centuries. We fight the lies of the Left; but we want a Spain, a Great Britain or Europe for everyone. We exist to unite.
To recover the proper sense of reality, to give hope without lying or manipulating. We are those who people can trust. A compass, a beacon in the midst of so much confusion. Those of us who are not afraid to appeal to hard work, to effort, to say that the road will not be easy, but that it is worth it compared to those who promise that in life everything is totally free.
It is essential that we remember all of this in today’s world. I insist that these are the foundations of liberalism: freedom, truth, humanity, the West, responsibility, courage and joy.
Recently, some misguided feminists shouted: ‘We want to be free, not brave.’ There can be nothing less liberal than this slogan. For everything valuable in life, courage is necessary: the coward ends up not living. He lives as a prisoner of his own fear.
In exercising freedom, we must take risks. Life itself must be free to be one’s own.
The Pope John Paul II, who did so much to free people around the world from totalitarianism, and helped them live in a liberal democracy, began his papacy with this message: ‘Be not afraid.’
That invitation to be brave, in the midst of the Cold War, from a man who had suffered both fascism and communism, changed everything. Leaders like Ronald Reagan followed that path. And the Berlin Wall was torn down. And the free world won the Cold War. We won.
That is why we are now puzzled, very worried, that we are giving up that victory, the values that led us to hope. What is happening to us?
Why have those who led that marvelous moment stopped appealing to freedom, to the West, truth, courage and joy?
At the same time, there are very powerful political forces that try to impose the rule of fear:
– Fear of the other, which is nationalism.
– Fear of reality, from which drugs and the escape to other virtual worlds and addictions come.
– Fear of freedom, which leads us dictatorship, censorship; the fear of political pluralism and liberal democracy.
– Fear of free enterprise, of private property and free competition.
– Fear of history itself, which is erased and supplanted; or fear even of women, of motherhood and of the future.
Terrorism – the scourge of humanity for a century – also relies on fear.
There is no dictatorship that does not use fear and harassment. Even going so far as to pervert the mechanisms of the state, and use them illegitimately against political alternatives.
That is why some of us see how bad actors want to instill fear in those of us in Spain who defend freedom and life, the rule of law, separation of powers, the truth of history, legal certainty, the Constitution and respect for institutions.
They go against us, against our families and against anyone who supports us. It is a warning to each of us and to anyone who thinks about getting into politics.
It goes to the extreme of normalising crime and criminalising normal life. That is – those who commit the worst crimes are enthroned and those who denounce them are persecuted. Whoever bases their life on abuse and lies is applauded. Whoever resists silencing it is considered to be in the way.
This is also how real life has been politicised. So that the artificial and ideological fabrications prevail over the truth.
Law and reality, truth, consensus and harmony are essential for the liberal. That is why the enemies of freedom seek to erode the rule of law. They fuel discord, class struggles and civil war.
But there is no freedom without law. Democracy without law is a den of thieves.
The law is the greatest, best and most transparent manifestation of open dialogue of all: it is in Parliament where in broad daylight one speaks and decides, with rules.
The law is the keeper of liberal democracy, of the government of the majority with respect for minorities, in alternation, in historical continuity. That is why totalitarians seek to supplant or denigrate parliaments.
But freedom is defended by exercising it. Hence why courage, overcoming fear and personal responsibility are essential.
José Ortega y Gasset posited that living is choosing. That is why he said that we ‘are made to be free’. And whoever does not choose has already chosen that others decide for him. He also said that ‘to choose’ has the same root as ‘elegant’. Elegant is the person who chooses well.
Let us remember that being liberal means believing that the end does not justify the means. The ‘how’ matters as much as the ‘what’. Hence, the liberal always follows the procedures established by law, and carries themselves with political decorum and a deep respect for institutions.
That is why living liberally is elegant, it is a well-chosen way of living. It is the opposite of doing whatever one wants without a sense of responsibility.
As you might now see, freedom is best understood as going hand in hand with responsibility, and that it is not so much ‘individual’ as ‘personal’.
Nor is it collective, but social, and therefore not socialist. It is not natural or biological, but biographical and historical.
The enemies of freedom conflate the state with the individual, property with taxes and public services, the individual with society, the public with the private and the individual with the family.
That is why I always prefer to refer to the ‘person’, rather than to the ‘individual’: being the person is a much richer and truer reality, neither material nor numerical.
As a person, I cannot be understood without my condition of being a woman, my family, my friends, my city, my homeland, my duties, my faith or absence of it and exercising my responsible freedom.
When all this is reduced to the ‘individual’, the door is opened to a terrible Trojan horse: egoism, materialism, isolation and blindness.
Because human, personal life is not written, it is not determined. It is uncertain, it is an adventure. History needs each one of us: our family, our profession and our world. That is why every human life has full meaning and is unique and irreplaceable.
This is why totalitarianism, which means that politics invades everything, that pretends that everything is political, is the opposite of liberal. Totalitarianism is a three-headed monster, comprising of nationalism, communism and fascism.
Also for that reason, the fever for ‘identity’, which is the last twist of the ‘natural’, is so illiberal: there are no two identical people nor is anything written.
Now we can understand why drugs are the greatest renunciation of freedom. This is why they are the greatest allies of tyrants in the world.
Freedom, like truth, makes liberalism possible. Freedom is a system: if one freedom falls, they all do. That is why I do not say ‘freedoms’, in the plural, but ‘freedom’, in the singular. There cannot be what some call ‘economic freedom’ if there is no freedom of expression, for example.
We need clear concepts, and true conviction, because neologisms have become the weapon of the far Left to undermine coexistence, education, the arts and make us doubt even our deepest beliefs.
And you can hopefully now see that this Spanish liberalism is in no way incompatible with true conservatism: the movement that flies the flag of responsibility, of good sense, of respect for the person and reality, and, therefore, the movement that is committed to reformism.
Totalitarianism seeks revolution: to destroy reality and impose the same things on everyone, rendering us all servants of an ideology.
We want reform: from respect for reality, we work to improve it by legitimate means.
In Madrid, we make this genuine liberalism, this Spanish liberalism, true every day. And we achieve it by believing in people, treating them as responsible adults. Letting them be themselves. Helping to protect the conditions that allow life under liberalism to be brave, generous and joyful.
The best public services, public-private collaboration, respect for property, support for those who risk their assets and those of their children; we care for family and motherhood, legal security and safe streets, low taxes, controlling red tape, open markets and free competition, not leaving anyone behind.
Being at the service of Spain, of the Hispanic world, of Europe and the West. And being the second home of all those who seek freedom and prosperity. That is our liberal way of doing politics.
Therefore, our answer to why we need freedom is always the same: to obtain the freedom to live.
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