Decentralizing among government bodies was one step. Returning capacity to the person is the step still missing.

Many government bodies do not mean more freedom

Spain is not a centralized state in the classical sense. The Constitution recognizes the autonomy of municipalities, provinces, and autonomous communities. Education, healthcare, and many services are administered territorially. Regional governments approve rules, manage budgets, and direct enormous organizations.

Denying this decentralization would be false. It would also be naive to confuse it with subsidiarity.

Power can move from Madrid to a regional capital without reaching the family, the professional, the school, the hospital, or the municipality. The office giving the order changes. The capacity of the person receiving the order does not necessarily change.

Spain suffers not only from excessive centralization. It suffers from an architecture in which several government bodies regulate, finance, coordinate, inspect, and explain the same outcome. Authority appears divided; accountability, dissolved.

When something works, everyone inaugurates it. When it fails, each level points to the one next to it.

Subsidiarity requires more than distributing power among politicians. It requires bringing power closer to those who understand the problem and linking decisions to consequences.

A real and complex decentralization

Articles 137 through 149 of the Constitution establish a plural territorial organization.

  • Municipalities, provinces, and autonomous communities manage their respective interests;
  • The State retains exclusive powers, among others, over international relations, defense, and the administration of justice, as well as basic rules in specific subject areas.

The model has a reasonable logic. It allows legal unity in essential matters and territorial diversity in services close to the public.

The difficulty appears at the boundaries.

  • Many policies combine national frameworks, regional implementation, shared financing, sectoral conferences, conditional funds, local execution, and judicial review.
  • That cooperation may be unavoidable.
  • It can also conceal who has the effective capacity to change the outcome.

Coordination then becomes a protective word. If everyone coordinates, no one fully directs. If no one directs, no one is fully accountable.

The bottom-up test: start with the person

Decentralization asks which government body exercises a power. Subsidiarity asks an earlier question: why should a government body exercise it at all?

Looking from the bottom up requires starting with the person. Then come the family, the professional, the institution, the association, and the municipality. Power should move upward only when the closest level cannot protect a right, bear a risk, or achieve the necessary scale.

This test does not eliminate the State. It places a burden of justification on it. The State must explain what it guarantees, what it finances, what it regulates, and why it needs to replace the citizen's decision.

  • Who is the primary decision-maker?
  • What can that person decide without asking permission?
  • What information does that person need to choose and compare?
  • What portion of the cost does that person know, pay, or bear?
  • What consequence does that person bear when right or wrong?
  • What safeguard protects someone who lacks resources, capacity, or support?
  • What specific failure justifies moving the decision upward?
  • Who is accountable by name and by results when the system fails?

Subsidiarity is not equivalent to ‘the private sector, always.’ It means that the higher level must demonstrate why it should intervene, limit that intervention to what is necessary, and return capacity when the lower level can assume it.

Municipal autonomy: recognized but constrained

The Constitution guarantees municipal autonomy, and the Law Regulating the Foundations of Local Government expressly refers to decentralization, proximity, effectiveness, and efficiency. The principle is written into law.

In practice, many municipalities depend on national and regional rules, financial transfers, authorizations, and earmarked programs. Small municipalities lack the technical capacity for certain functions; large ones can manage much more than they are allowed to.

Subsidiarity does not require assigning the same power to everyone. A municipality of five hundred residents and a city of three million do not have identical capacities. One-size-fits-all treatment can also be centralizing.

The answer is variable geometry:

  • clear powers of their own;
  • voluntary cooperation;
  • intermunicipal associations when they add scale, and delegation accompanied by resources.
  • A task should remain local when the municipality can assume it.
  • It should be shared when scale requires it.
  • And it should move upward only when the two previous options fail.

The size of the municipality matters. Its political affiliation should not.

The State as a player: companies and public media

Subsidiarity does not prohibit all public ownership. It requires a specific justification.

  • SEPI holds significant stakes in companies considered strategic.
  • In July 2026, its public list of companies showed a 10% stake in Telefónica and approximately 28% in Indra, in addition to other holdings.

When the State holds a stake in a company, it should answer questions that any serious owner would ask:

  • Is there a strategic capability that cannot be protected through regulation, contracts, special shares, or investment screening?
  • What measurable objective does the stake pursue?
  • Who evaluates its opportunity cost?
  • Who evaluates the outcome?
  • Is there a deadline or an exit condition?
  • Can the State neutrally regulate a company in which it is a shareholder?

The phrase ‘strategic company’ cannot close the debate. It should open it. The State as referee loses credibility when it also plays and retains the power to change the rules.

Public media: service or megaphone

Public media present the same conflict. They can cover emergencies, preserve archives, provide regional information, and serve content that the market does not sustain. Public media run the risk of becoming instruments of the government of the day; that is why their independence must be verifiable.

The subsidiarity-based answer is neither to accept a public monopoly without question nor to deny every shared function. It requires verifiable independence, transparent financing, a limited mandate, audience evaluation, and a clear boundary between public service and propaganda.

The more plural the private and social offering, the harder it is to justify expanding a compulsorily financed outlet. And the more necessary its function, the more strongly it must be protected from those who appoint its governing bodies.

Information does not become neutral because the budget pays for it. A power that participates in the debate should not control the megaphone.

Education: from a divided system to responsible educational agency

Education does not begin in the ministry or the regional department. It begins with a particular child, within a particular family, with abilities, difficulties, and interests that no general program can fully know.

The State has a legitimate role. It must protect children, guarantee essential learning, and prevent poverty from closing off opportunities. But that guarantee does not imply that it must set every method, every pathway, and every pace.

Five functions that are often mixed together should be separated: care, instruction, socialization, certification, and child protection. They do not all require the same decision-maker or the same provider.

The subsidiarity question separates the floor from the ceiling.

  • The common floor protects reading, writing, mathematics, science, civic coexistence, and critical thinking.
  • Above it, there should be room for different projects, teachers with professional judgment, and families able to choose.

Autonomy requires accountability. A school with room to act must show results. A family that chooses assumes duties. A provider receiving public funds cannot select only the easy-to-teach student. Freedom without information ends up protecting the strong. Control without choice ends up protecting the bureaucracy.

Financing should expand the capacity to choose, with greater support when there are disabilities, vulnerabilities, or higher educational costs. Financing the person does not mean financing every circumstance equally.

There must also be a right to exit. Changing schools or methods cannot become a privilege for those with money, contacts, or the right address. Plural approaches, including combinations of home and school, should also be open to exploration, with verifiable safeguards for the child and an adequate legal basis.

‘The path to Truth is built through Knowledge and the practice of Critical Thinking’ -- Pedro Tellería

The debate is not public school versus private school. It is a different one:

  • Do we finance structures or educate people?
  • Do we protect the child or monopolize the child's education?
  • Do we measure learning or impose procedures?

A subsidiarity-based education would move decisions down to the family, the teacher, and the school. The higher level would retain only what it alone can guarantee. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Healthcare: from administrative territory to patient agency

Healthcare does not begin in an organizational chart either. It begins when a person is ill and a professional tries to help. Everything else—budget, network, technology, and regulation—makes sense only if it improves that relationship.

Spain has decentralized management, but patients can remain subject to boundaries they did not choose.

  • Mobility can strain continuity of care when information or the clinical pathway does not effectively follow the patient, despite advances in interoperability.
  • A patient may need a test and enter a waiting list for which no one takes ownership.
  • A patient may be facing a physician who knows the solution but lacks the room to apply it.

Subsidiarity in healthcare requires separating guarantees, financing, provision, regulation, and evaluation.

  • The State can ensure that no one is left without essential care. It does not therefore need to turn every citizen into a captive user of a single pathway.
  • Patients should be able to know outcomes, move their information, seek a second opinion, and choose within clear rules.
  • Professionals should retain clinical discretion.
  • Institutions should be accountable for waiting times, safety, and outcomes.

Government should coordinate what requires scale: interoperability, surveillance, emergencies, and protection of vulnerable people.

Primary care should function as a gateway to guidance, not as a barrier. It can coordinate the care pathway if the patient retains information, a second opinion, and an exit option.

Making costs visible does not mean abandoning sick people. It means remembering that every resource used for one decision is no longer available for another. Solidarity requires truthful accounting. Freedom requires protection against catastrophic risk.

It is also legitimate to ask whether financing can follow the patient and whether someone who chooses another provider should receive some recognition. The answer cannot be automatic. It must pass a distributional test: does it expand real options, or transfer resources to someone who could already pay?

A subsidiarity-based healthcare system does not pit public and private provision against each other like religions. It requires both to demonstrate their usefulness.

  • The provider that heals better, treats sooner, and preserves dignity should be able to grow.
  • A provider that persistently fails should not be protected by its label.

Pensions: returning capacity without breaking promises

Pensions extend subsidiarity through time. A decision a person makes today conditions that person's freedom thirty years from now. That is why the first requirement is not ideological. It is informational.

Every worker should know how much he or she contributes, what benefit can be expected, which assumptions it depends on, and who bears the risk if those assumptions fail. A promise citizens cannot understand cannot be governed responsibly either.

The system combines different objectives that should be separated.

  • One is preventing poverty in old age.
  • Another is recognizing rights linked to contributions.
  • Another is allowing each person to save, invest, and decide how much risk to assume.

When everything is mixed together, no one knows what is guaranteed and what depends on the next budget.

A subsidiarity-based reform must protect rights that have already vested.

  • No one can redo at age seventy the decisions made under earlier rules.
  • But it can also gradually open room for diversification: a clear public foundation, portable collective instruments, and chosen personal savings.

Freedom in retirement requires flexibility. Not all careers wear people down equally. Not everyone wants to retire at the same time. Working fewer hours over more years, combining employment and a pension, or retiring early should depend on transparent rules, not political exceptions.

A critique need not compare the system to a crime in order to be profound. It is enough to ask uncomfortable questions: how much does it promise? How is it financed? Which generation bears the cost? What risk remains hidden? What room does the individual retain to diversify?

Diversification does not mean abandoning solidarity. It means preventing well-being in old age from depending on a single decision-maker, a single source of financing, and a single promise the citizen does not control.

Taxes and spending: criticism needs honest measures

Subsidiarity also requires knowing who pays. But fiscal criticism loses force when it mixes labor costs, personal taxes, contributions, consumption, public spending, and debt to produce a spectacular figure.

We do not need to exaggerate. We need to separate magnitudes. What part of labor cost reaches the worker? What part finances the worker's own benefits? Which level collects revenue? Which level decides? What service does the citizen receive? What obligations are passed to future generations?

Precise figures are usually less spectacular. They are also more dangerous to those who do not want to be held accountable.

A subsidiarity agenda for Spain

Spain does not need another grand reorganization proclaimed from above. It needs to apply discipline function by function.

  • Separate guarantees, financing, provision, regulation, and evaluation. Concentrating them makes it impossible to know what fails.
  • Assign each power to a visible accountable authority. Cooperation must have a leader and public results.
  • Strengthen the autonomy of municipalities, institutions, and professionals where capacity exists, together with transparent comparison.
  • Finance the person or the outcome when doing so expands choice without abandoning vulnerable people.
  • Periodically review agencies, subsidies, regulations, and public shareholdings. Every intervention must demonstrate its usefulness again.
  • Allow territorial diversity within common rights. Equality does not require everything to be managed in the same way; it requires that no one be left unprotected because of where they live.
  • Return to citizens room to act over education, health, savings, and services, accompanied by information and accountability.

A subsidiarity-based Spain would not be a country without a State. It would be a country in which the State stops confusing presence with effectiveness.

Conclusion

Decentralizing among government bodies was one step. Returning capacity to society is the step still missing.

Power is not returned by changing offices. It is returned when the person regains the capacity to choose, compare, and answer for decisions.

Verified sources and references

  • Spanish Parliament, Spanish Constitution, Official State Gazette No. 311, December 29, 1978; Articles 137, 148, and 149. URL: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1978-31229 (accessed August 17, 2026).
  • Head of State, Law 7/1985 of April 2, Regulating the Foundations of Local Government; Articles 2.1 and 25. URL: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1985-5392 (accessed August 17, 2026).
  • Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports, ‘Legal framework of the education system’; section ‘Rules developed by the Education Authorities.’ URL: https://educagob.educacionfpydeportes.gob.es/sistema-educativo/marco-legal.html (accessed August 17, 2026).
  • Ministry of Health, ‘National Health System’; introductory section on decentralization, cohesion, and coordination. URL: https://www.sanidad.gob.es/organizacion/sns/home.htm (accessed August 17, 2026).
  • Royal Legislative Decree 8/2015 of October 30, consolidated text of the General Social Security Law; Article 110.1. URL: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2015-11724#a110 (accessed August 17, 2026).
  • SEPI, ‘Companies’; INDRA and TELEFÓNICA records, published shareholdings. URL: https://www.sepi.es/es/sectores/empresas?field_participacion_target_id=21&tid=All&title=All (accessed August 17, 2026; revalidate before publication).
  • Constitutional Court, Judgment 133/2010 of December 2; Legal Grounds 5 and 8–9. URL: https://hj.tribunalconstitucional.es/es/Resolucion/Show/6772 (accessed August 17, 2026).