MadridThe Rafael del Pino Foundation is the temple of Spanish liberals and that is why it is not surprising that it invites one of its gurus, the journalist of Financial Times Martin Wolf is considered the most influential business journalist in the world. It happens that Wolf, like other gurus of neoliberalism such as Francis Fukuyama, has recently moved towards criticizing inequality and defending social democracy, which some listeners, such as a couple of pensioners behind me, disgusted at ” “the monster” of the Spanish government that Pedro Sánchez is preparing.
Indeed, Wolf, who is giving a half-hour conference to present his book The crisis of democratic capitalism (Deusto) tries to explain to the audience that populism endangers democracies and that without democracy there is no liberal capitalism. For the journalist, the key lies in inequality, because without “an economy that gives citizens a better life, the idea of common citizenship is lost.”
But the British thinker, son of Jews who escaped Nazism, goes further, warning against what he calls “bureaucratic capitalism” represented by China and which is “a major rival to democratic capitalism.” Wolf speaks of Xi Jinping as an “inefficient and evil” leader, adding that China and other dictatorships “can collapse like the Soviet Union because the system is failing, because there are no channels between the people and the government and there is a tendency to concentrate power. “on corruption”. “In the UK we had Boris Johnson, who turned out to be a fraud, and Liz Truss, who was a bigot, but we were able to get them out peacefully. There were no deaths. Now compare the situation with Putin or Xi Jinping, who can only be driven out by force,” he emphasizes, defending the superiority of liberal democracy.
The audience could not miss the typical question from someone who thinks that one of the threats to democracy is a state of excessive welfare, for example in the health system. Wolf wrinkles his nose because he sees that he hasn’t been fully understood and remembers that the American healthcare system is actually “a disaster.”
