The Far Right in Spain Is Different

Judging by the results of recent local elections, Spain’s far right could well become a crucial part of the country’s next federal government. As Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez prepares for the snap general election he called for to occur on July 23, the worry at the top of his mind will be how to crush it.

Sánchez’s left-leaning Partido Socialista (PSOE) tanked in the regional and municipal elections held on May 28. Meanwhile, the far-right Vox party scored victories from Cantabria to the Costa del Sol, winning more than 11 percent of the popular vote. Sánchez hopes that the forthcoming general election will provide an opportunity to rally the anti-right vote, campaigning on a pun that frames the election as a choice between democratic “rights” and the far “right.” But will highlighting the danger that Vox poses to the country be enough to secure him a second term in office?

Whether he succeeds will have far-reaching repercussions for Spain and its position in Europe. If a government coalition featuring Vox takes power in Madrid, it will be the first time that an openly far-right party has entered the country’s federal government since the end of Spain’s military dictatorship in 1975, following the death of Francisco Franco. And, given that the election will be held less than a month after Spain assumes the mantle of the presidency of the Council of the European Union, a Vox victory would let the far right set the council’s meeting agenda.

Ordinarily, items the council might tackle would include boosting sustainable economic growth, fostering social and territorial cohesion, strengthening European identity, and consolidating the fight against climate change—issues on which Vox, like other far-right parties, holds illiberal views. But due to the uniqueness of Spain’s far right, its stance on those issues might not echo that of Europe’s more familiar illiberal autocrats, and how it would behave at the council’s helm is not intuitive. As Spaniards go to the polls next month, Europeans across the continent should stay tuned.

Other European countries—including France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the United Kingdom—have had their own brands of far-right political parties for decades. In this respect, Spain is fairly late to the game. But now that Vox has arrived on the scene, the party is promising to shake up Spanish politics in much the same way that Italy’s Lega, France’s National Rally, and Britain’s UK Independence Party.

As last month’s elections show, the conservative vote is now spread thin between Vox and the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), the PSOE’s traditional opposition—and Vox’s parent party. In two of Spain’s provinces, Valencia and Extremadura, the PP will not be able to govern without Vox’s support, which puts Vox in a very strong negotiating position.

This type of clout is new for Vox, which was founded in 2013 after a group of MPs led by Santiago Abascal grew frustrated that the PP had grown too centrist and decided to split away. “It seems obvious from the results of this [local] election that Vox has increased its level of support and the [far-right] is now becoming normalized,” said Sandra León, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid.

“When Vox first made it to regional government, there was still a lot of debate about how the PP was going to react,” she said. “Would they impose a cordon sanitaire [whereby one political party refuses to cooperate with another] around Vox? Nobody is talking about this now.” León said that such hesitancy in rejecting the ideology of Vox shows just how much of an integral part of Spain’s politics the party has become.

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The pendulum of power in Spanish politics has been swinging from the PP to the PSOE and back again since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, barring an attempted coup by Francoist Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero in 1981. Now, for the first time in Spanish political history and because of Vox’s electoral surge, the PSOE’s strategy for holding on to national power will focus on a party whose base includes Franco sympathizers.

While Vox leaders continue to see themselves as more right-leaning than the members of the PP party, they shy away from branding themselves as far right or extrema derecha, a term which carries Francoist undertones in Spain and which Vox wants to avoid using explicitly. “In Spain, the idea of extreme right or far right is inevitably associated with Francoism. A lot of members of Vox, and even the PP, avoid condemnation of Franco, but Vox prefers to see itself as ultra-conservative rather than extreme right,” said Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera, a professor at the University of Barcelona.

But whether or not they advertise it as such, Vox’s leaders are the political descendants of the Franco era. Some former generals who signed a manifesto supporting Franco’s legacy stood as Vox candidates in 2019. There is another historical connection with Franco in that the PP, from which Vox was spun off, was formed in the 1970s by a member of Franco’s government.

Where the PP has sought to distance itself from its openly Francoist past, Vox is actively bringing old Francoist rhetoric and pro-regime policies back to the country. At the heart of the party is a strong nationalist, one-Spain ideology (España: Una, Grande, y Libre), the same ideology that drove Franco to power. Vox’s election manifesto calls for key points that could be construed as sympathetic to Francoism, including “stricter penalties for insulting the Flag, Crown or Anthem” (written in capital letters) and, notably, repealing the 2007 Historical Memory Law, which seeks to “promote moral reparations” for the victims of Francoist violence and persecution.

The controversial law, passed by the PSOE, mandates the right of the descendants of the regime’s victims to dig up mass graves, of which there are hundreds throughout the country, and helps family members obtain information for tracking down loved ones imprisoned or executed by the regime.

Sympathy to Franco may be specific to a Spanish far-right agenda, but Vox espouses values traditionally shared by the far right in other contexts, as well. The party’s manifesto calls for the closure of mosques that “propagate fundamentalism, contempt for women or jihad,” supports deporting immigrants considered to be residing in Spain illegally, and opposes abortion and pregnancy-related sick leave. Vox has also unsuccessfully attempted to repeal pro-LGBTIQ laws and denied climate change.

Despite these far-right inclinations, the party has sought to distance itself from Europe’s other far-right parties, a position reflected within its representation in Brussels. In 2019, while many of Europe’s more traditional right-wing parties (such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the Freedom Party of Austria, and Italy’s Lega) were setting up their own far-right coalition group within the European Parliament, called Identity and Democracy, Vox chose to align itself with the more center-leaning European Conservatives and Reformists.

Why this distance? Unlike many other far right parties in Europe, Vox enjoys a high level of support among middle-class voters. Rodríguez-Aguilera said that this is largely down to the party’s neoliberal agenda. Vox founder and leader Abascal “is totally in favor of deregulation, privatization, liberalization—so in an economic sense he is much more connected with the conservatives rather than the radical right,” he said. Proposals to abolish Spain’s hefty inheritance tax or to make it easier for houseowners to evict illegal squatters have therefore resonated with Vox’s core supporters.

“Vox is playing to certain fears of the Spanish middle class that have been prevalent ever since the time of Franco, based around property and property ownership,” said Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, a professor at Fordham University in New York. Franco rose to power after launching a military insurrection against a republican government that had pursued a policy of “agrarian reform,” or widespread expropriation of the agricultural lands in southern Spain known as latifundios. Rubio-Pueyo said that, in catering to the ruling class’s lingering anxieties over property ownership, Vox could best be described as a “post-Fascist” political movement.

The party is less anxious about race than its post-Fascist counterparts, however. While Vox campaigns on an anti-immigration platform, it remains unclear how much political mileage there is to be gained from blaming the foreigner. This also sets the circumstances contributing to the rise of the far right in Spain apart from many other large European countries. “Spain has traditionally held fairly progressive views towards immigration,” said León, the political scientist.

This viewpoint is supported in regular surveys by Spain’s national Center for Social Research, a public research institute. When asked about the top three problems afflicting Spain at the moment, few Spaniards mention migration as one of them. A  survey published by the European Commission last June showed that 20 percent of Spaniards regard immigration as more of a problem than an opportunity, compared to 39 percent in France, 26 percent in Italy, 27 percent in Germany, 31 percent in Denmark, 35 percent in Austria, and 60 percent in Greece. The issue is not front and center of many people’s minds, said Carmen González Enríquez, a senior analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute, a Spanish think tank.

“It’s true that anti-immigration sentiment has been increasing in Spain in recent years, but what is very different in the country is the importance that people attach to the issue,” said León. “Migration is still not that important for [Spanish] voters.”

Another difference between far-right talking points in Spain and elsewhere in Europe is Spain’s attitude toward the European Union itself. While other European far-right parties have been feverishly Euroskeptic from the outset, Vox has been careful to tone down its anti-EU rhetoric. Many Spaniards remain grateful for the support that the EU offered to help cope with the fallout from COVID-19.

“The European Union is seen in Spain as a kind of protector against our own government,” González Enríquez said. “The European identity of Spaniards is stronger and more intense than the EU average because the EU is seen as a safe world of modernity, of rationality, of peace, of democracy. This is in contrast to the bad opinion that we have about our own state institutions.”

Sánchez will have to fight that opinion as the race revs up ahead of the vote. “Sánchez is calling for a united front to counter the prospect of a far-right government coming into power, which after the recent local elections is a now a realistic possibility, but it is very uncertain that this strategy will work,” said Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College in the United States.

Rallying the anti-right vote around democratic rights versus far-right campaign rhetoric is a start. The problem for Sánchez is that Vox has now become an integral part of the country’s political makeup. It will no longer be enough for him to just dismiss Vox as a marginal right-wing annoyance. Whether he can adapt and survive remains to be seen.