Fernández-Lasquetty, Ayuso's tireless tax cutter

Javier Fernández-Lasquetty.Luis Grañena

This dead man is very much alive.

Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, resigned as Minister of Health of the Community of Madrid in 2014, returns to the Government five years later, this time as head of the Treasury, and those who see him treading the corridors of power again in that summer of 2019 do not give credit.

“They were looking at me the way you would look at someone raised from the dead,” he laughs.

“'But if he died, if I saw how he died!”, evokes a scene that has a lot of claim.

Lasquetty (Madrid, 56 years old) resigned in 2014 due to the white tides of toilets who protested his commitment to the private management of the new public hospitals and on his return to politics he is a man determined to impregnate government action with liberal ideology of the Executive of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Whatever it takes.

"His mission is to carry out a policy of tax reduction and economic liberalization," reads his official profile.

In case there were doubts.

More information

Welfare state: history and crisis of a revolutionary idea

"Lasquetty is an anti-State Taliban," describes Eduardo Gutiérrez, a deputy from Más Madrid.

"He is from the Austrian school of the 19th century, from Von Mises and later Hayek, who proposed a minimal State: army and security forces," he continues.

“Today he has more weight than in the days of Esperanza Aguirre.

Today he is the great economic and ideological guru.

His ideological-economic

of him is complete and exhaustive throughout the Government ”.

The Executive of Madrid, which has lived in recent years between conflicts over the resources of public services, is marked by liberal ideology.

The president, Díaz Ayuso, is described by a collaborator as a "professor in the dogma of the PP".

One step below, the ideological seal of the Government is reinforced by the councilors Enrique Ossorio, Paloma Martín and Fernández-Lasquetty.

None, however, operates with the decision-making capacity and conviction of the latter.

First, because he designs the Budgets, which are the script and the score of every government.

Second, because he has the maximum liberal credentials that the PP can give (he was general secretary of FAES and deputy director of the cabinet of former president José María Aznar).

And third,

"It attracts my attention a lot when the government of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan begins, when I was 13 and 14 years old," he says.

They talked about freedom.

And that is what led him to politics, he explains about the 1982 electoral campaign, in which he joined the PP of the Salamanca district, where he met today's councilor Martín.

He is in politics for principle, he stresses, not for anything else.

“I think that the ideas in which I believe are better than those of the socialists;

I believe that freedom is the principle that explains everything, that justifies everything and to which everything must be directed ”, he adds.

"[But the ideological seal to the Government] is given by the president."

Invoking freedom, so far this legislature Fernández-Lasquetty has designed tax cuts for more than 700 million euros, in order to deepen a tax policy that has led the Administration to renounce, according to what he says, more than 50,000 million in income so far this century.

In defense of freedom, her department articulated a personal income tax bonus to attract 30,000 assets from abroad with the guarantee that some 245 million will be saved, although it was not finally approved due to Vox's refusal, this week, to support her.

And with freedom as a flag, she defends that the true effectiveness of the public sphere is provided by private management.

“The worst thing about it is that it continues to insist, after what we have experienced with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, that our children's cabbages or the health care that takes care of us are not important, but that it is a priority to forgive 992 million each year to 0.2% of the great fortunes ”, portrays Juan Lobato, the spokesman for the PSOE.

A description to which his own is contrasted by Pedro Muñoz Abrines, the PP spokesman in the autonomous Parliament: “His liberal baggage is important.

It marks always useful principles and lines.

And, furthermore, his past management experience in other areas, whether public or university, allows him to apply the principles from common sense and the real world ”.

Lasquetty has reached this point, inspired by key books and authors of liberalism:

, by Friedrich Hayek;

, by Alexis de Tocqueville;

The law, by Frédéric Bastiat... But not only for that.

After his first departure from the regional government, he enlisted as vice-rector of the Francisco Marroquín University, the temple of liberalism in Latin America, where he learned that the Constitutional Court endorsed the private management model for public hospitals that he had launched in Madrid and learned that Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa included him in the acknowledgments of his book

.

A fan of

and a collector of comic book objects, Lasquetty is also a lover of baroque music and addicted to series.

But not even in his spare time does he abandon his liberal bent.

“The last series I've seen on Filmin is Croatian and it was called

”, he recounts.

"[With that title], I had to see it."

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