Tag: VOX

We’re toasting to Spanish far right’s defeat for all the wrong reasons

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By Antonio Maestre, Journalist and writer

Vox is nothing more than a simplified expression of the ideas that were always seen as acceptable by Spain’s conservative hardliners, Antonio Maestre writes.

In 1994, former Spanish Foreign Legion Corporal Massimo Testa de Andrés died in Melilla and was buried in the city cemetery of La Purísima. 

Testa’s real name was Andrea Ghira: he was the infamous Butcher of Circeo and the perpetrator of one of the most violent crimes in Italian history. 

There is not a single Italian citizen alive in 1975 who does not remember the photograph of bloodied and beaten Donatella Colasanti being helped out of the boot of a Fiat 127 where Ghira, Gianni Guido and Angelo Izzo had put her together with Rosario López.

The three men kidnapped them, raped them for two days, tortured them, and left them both for dead while they went to have dinner with their families. 

They drowned López in a bathtub. Colasanti survived by pretending to drop dead after they struck her with an iron bar.

The crime was known as the Circeo massacre because it took place in the town where these three young men of the Roman bourgeoisie had a villa where they perpetrated the crime. 

The three murderers were linked to fascist parties and organisations. They considered the kidnap, rape and murder of two working-class girls good entertainment. 

The far-right hooligan Andrea Ghira never served a sentence for these crimes. He took refuge in Spain because all the fascists of the world have always known that it was a safe place for them and their ilk. 

Francoism never left the mainstream

Back to the present day: Europe, at least a part of it, has breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the results of the July general elections in Spain, in which the extreme right lost a significant portion of its seats in the parliament and has not managed to enter the government together with the Popular Party (PP) as the polls predicted.

The international press has since dubbed Spain as an anti-fascist bridgehead that has managed to go against the rising influence of the post-fascists on our continent today. 

Yet, it did so without delving into the profound particularities of a country that has long metabolised its ideology within the institutions. 

In Spain, the ideology that has never been persecuted or sanctioned is not seen as politically incorrect or unacceptable. 

In fact, fascism, or its Spanish derivative, Francoism, has undergone a process of institutional integration during Francisco Franco’s rule that makes it very difficult for it to stand apart from the mainstream in order to become novel or avant-garde, as it does in other European countries such as Germany or France, where it was persecuted.

A history of letting fascists sleep peacefully

What Germany, France and Italy do have in common is the exile of their leading figures of the criminal extreme right to Spain. 

The cemeteries of Madrid are the final resting place of the most distinguished figures of international fascism. Only the leaders of the extreme right who were annihilated by the Partisans or persecuted by the Allies did not fall into eternal sleep in the capital of Spain. 

The cases are innumerable, but it is worth mentioning some of these infamous figures in the criminal history of fascism. 

Personalities such as Ante Pavelić, the Croatian Nazi Ustaša leader who collected human eyes to decorate the centrepieces of his office tables, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the Nazi Vichy collaborationist in charge of Jewish affairs, and Otto Skorzeny, an SS colonel and head of Nazi special operations, passed through Spain, rested, took refuge and led a public and social life. 

The collusion of the Spanish state, its dictatorship-derived laws surviving in democracy, a philo-fascist right wing and a social democracy unwilling to carry out a thorough revision of Franco’s rule and bring foreign and domestic war criminals to justice made Spain a paradise for any fascist or Nazi in search of a peaceful retirement. 

Protections that were forged during Franco’s regime continued in a democracy that refused to respect the demands of the countries of origin of the fugitives whenever extradition was requested, justified by the fact that certain crimes were not criminalised in the Spanish legal system.

Those in Europe celebrating that Spain has not fallen prey to the extreme right in the last election do not fully understand that the danger lies not so much in an extreme right that will never get beyond 15% of the vote but rather in a conservative mainstream that is very affectionate to post-fascists because they have always felt close to the same ideas. 

Vox only says the quiet part loud

The Spanish conservative right is much more radical than its counterpart in Germany and France for the simple reason that it was formed on the premise of the triumph of its local fascism. 

In Spain, they were victorious and have not had to be ashamed of their legacy in the Civil War and dictatorship, whereas, in Germany or France, they were built on the premise of repudiation of a past or confrontation with Nazism in World War II. 

The extreme right in Spain had been latent for many years within the PP itself, and Vox is nothing more than a simplified expression of the ideas always seen as acceptable by conservative hardliners. 

The likes of Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal simply dare to say them out loud and publicly defend them. 

And in the run-up to the 2024 European elections, Europe’s conservatives, like their Spanish peers, are choosing the same attitude of quiet acceptance of the new far-right parties’ fascist ideas.

To put it simply: the European conservative right has learned it cannot defeat the extreme right and has decided to build bridges with them instead. 

Europe’s conservatives will now take a page out of Spain’s book

The European People’s Party (EPP) flagbearers, including Italy’s Antonio Tajani and Germany’s Manfred Weber, have already made strides to integrate fascists into the much larger conservative family. Alberto Nuñez Feijóo would have been one more piece of that movement. 

The leader of the Spanish PP wanted Italian Prime Minister and leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia Giorgia Meloni to join the EPP, as he made abundantly clear in a joint interview with the newspapers El Mundo and Corriere Della Sera. 

Spain is an example in Europe not for what has been celebrated as the brave resistance of PSOE’s leader Pedro Sánchez to the rise of the extreme right, but for having been the archetype of a democratic state that has never dealt with lingering fascist ideas in the institutions favouring the impunity of those who committed crimes protected by that criminal ideology. 

And if anything, Spain will now serve as the model for how to integrate the extreme right into the mainstream without it being too noticeable.

Antonio Maestre is a journalist and writer. He is a regular contributor to eldiario.es, La Sexta and La Marea, as well as Le Monde Diplomatique and Jacobin. Maestre is the author of books Los Rotos (“The Broken Ones”), Infames (“Infamous”), and Franquismo S.A. (“Francoism PLC”).

At Euronews, we believe all views matter. Contact us at [email protected] to send pitches or submissions and be part of the conversation.

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From Catalonia to the crises: Why is the far right growing in Spain?

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With polls predicting victory for the right-wing Popular Party, a future national government that includes Santiago Abascal’s party is more than likely. Its growth is the result of several factors, and can be traced back to the push for Catalan independence in 2017.

Long gone are the days when Spain was one of the few oases in Europe without a far-right presence in its institutions. But since the 2019 general elections, the Vox party holds 52 of the 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies.

With polls giving victory to the right-wing Popular Party (PP), a future national government that includes Santiago Abascal’s Vox, which is expected to win about 13 per cent of votes, is more than likely. 

“The Popular Party has managed, thanks to its pact with Vox, to make acceptable a force that was once absolutely marginal and had a kind of democratic cordon sanitaire around it,” says political analyst Verónica Fumanal.

Its growth is the result of several factors. To understand, we have to go back to the push for Catalan independence in 2017.  The following year, Vox, which was established in 2013, began to make electoral gains.

“The whole Catalan pro-independence process was experienced throughout Spain as a very strong emotional shock, and Vox rode on the back of that emotionality, that reactivity,” says Fumanal.

Added to this was the Popular Party’s corruption scandals, which brought down Mariano Rajoy’s government through a motion of censure, which saw the Socialist Party come to power with the support of the extreme left and secessionist parties. 

“This was obviously capitalised on by Vox because this is where we find one of their greatest enemies, what they consider to be the anti-Spain,” says historian and author of ‘Far Right 2.0’, Steven Forti.

Among these “enemies”, says Forti, are not only nationalism and independence, but also “everything connected to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, the rights of minorities, and feminism”, which Vox regularly attacks in its speeches and electoral programme.

But there are other elements that analysts see as key to the rise of the far right in Spain. Fumanal refers to technological changes that are “causing a new cleavage, not only left-right, not only nationalist-non-nationalist but also, for example, rural-urban”.

It is also fed by a fear of the unknown, which “always has a nostalgic movement behind it”, and the poor socio-economic situation. 

“The social elevator has been quarantined. Today, a young person who is better educated than his or her parents is not guaranteed to live better than them. This social contract is what allows populist forces to engage and connect with young people as well,” says Fumanal.

A ‘whitewashed’ populist discourse

“Every successful discourse has small connections with reality,” says Fumanal. She says  Vox uses errors such as the “law of the only yes is yes” which allowed the reduction of sentences for sex offenders as a “weapon of war”.

It can do so with complete freedom, according to the political analyst, because “populism has no ethical or moral limitations, nor any commitment to the truth”.

This political communication is carried out through “B2B channels that are not controlled, generating watertight communities that are not ashamed, communities that feed off each other and are increasingly large because they do not have the element of contrast“. Their aim, in Fumanal’s words, is “to inoculate, not to inform”.

The process of these extremist discourses taking hold in Spain has been gradual and has had to do with the approval of the traditional right.

“Of course, Vox has been whitewashed. Not only after the elections in Andalusia,” argues Steven Forti. 

For the historian, the turning point in the PP’s attitude was its presence, together with another political party, Ciudadanos, and Vox in a joint demonstration in Madrid’s Plaza Colón against socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government.

“Spain never had what is called a cordon sanitaire or democratic cordon in the face of extreme right-wing forces,” Forti points out. Something that materialised after the municipal and regional elections of 28 May 2023 with government pacts between PP and Vox.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP party signed governability pacts in coalition with Vox in 135 town councils throughout Spain that “largely buy some of Vox’s programmatic points”.

The consideration of the far right and its ideology as something “democratically acceptable”, says Fumanal, has also been contributed to by certain media, “because there are certain powers that consider that the right must come to power, and for the Popular Party to do this, it needs a springboard, which is Vox”.

The European extremist wave

Spain is one of the latest countries to join this move to the far right, which has been seen in both Europe and the United States, and which, according to Steven Forti, is in response to the increase in socio-economic inequalities, the so-called “cultural reaction” to social changes or immigration, and the crisis of liberal democracies. The ‘firewalls’ against extremist discourses have collapsed in recent decades, and disaffection with democracy has helped one that exploits fear to take hold.

Looking ahead to the European elections in June 2024, the EU is fearful of the effect that a Popular Party coalition government with Vox in Spain could have. In addition to reinforcing the ultra-conservative wave experienced in Europe since elections in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and Greece, Forti says this would open the door to the “possibility of a future alliance after the next European elections between the European People’s Party and European conservatives and reformists”.

“The extreme right-wingers have all repositioned themselves, so they are not talking about Brexit, Frexit, or Italexit. However, none of them are in favour of greater European integration”, says Forti. Vox, like the party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia), advocates a halt to European integration and the recovery of national sovereignty.

But how much can this extremist wave continue to grow? Fumanal believes that when these parties come to power, they do not focus on issues that affect citizens. 

“It is an identity war, not an ideological one,” she says. “Therefore, when they have governed, they are not re-elected. Trump wasn’t re-elected, Bolsonaro either, and we’ll see if Meloni is re-elected. Only in countries where these beliefs are really embedded in society, such as Poland and Hungary, do governments like this persist”.

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