VOX

The Rise of the Spanish Populist Radical Right

José Rama, Lisa Zanotti, Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, Andrés Santana

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394542
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

This book examines VOX, the first major and electorally successful populist radical right-wing party to emerge in Spain since the death of General Franco, and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in the late 1970s.

In December 2018, VOX, a new party on the populist radical right, entered the Andalusian regional parliament, and played the role of kingmaker in the ensuing government formation discussions. Since then, under the leadership of Santiago Abascal, VOX has earned political representation in numerous local, regional and national elections. The party attracted more than 3.6 million votes in the November 2019 general election, making VOX the third largest party in the Spanish Congress. In two years, the party has become a key political challenger and an important player in Spanish politics. This book explains the origins of the party, its ideology and relationship with democracy, its appeal with voters, and its similarities with (and differences from) other populist radical right parties in Europe. It draws upon a rich source of domestic as well as cross-national survey data and a systematic analysis of party manifestos which provide a detailed account of the rise of VOX and what its emergence means for Spanish politics.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of comparative politics, political parties, voters and elections, Spanish politics, the populist radical right and populism in general.

1

Introduction

From pariah to the institutions

If you feel gratitude and honour for those who wear a uniform and guard the wall;

If you remember those who have fallen so that they do not fall into nothing;

If you respect the history of your elders;

If you are willing to push yourself to protect your future and the wealth of your children;

If you love your country as you love your parents;

If you bless beauty, the good and truth;

If you are willing to fight in an eternal fight for freedom;

If you take part and get your hands dirty to fight injustice;

If you think that in risk, there is hope;

Then believe me, if you do all of this day and night;

During the storm and during peace times;

In the days of misery and in the days of abundance;

Then you will know that you are succeeding in helping to:

MAKE SPAIN GREAT AGAIN.

(Santiago Abascal, from VOX election campaign video, 2018)¹

More than 9,000 VOX sympathizers filled the Vistalegre Stadium in Madrid in October 2018. A former bullring was the selected venue for the first big demonstration of the depth and breadth of the support enjoyed by Spain’s new populist radical right party. Born in 2013, without any notable electoral success, VOX [Latin: voice] looked set to join the graveyard full of failed radical and extreme right-wing parties that had fallen short of their goal of rupturing Spain’s exceptional status as a country free of the radical or extreme right since the transition to democracy. Fast-forward to 2018 and, in the lead-up to the regional elections of Andalusia, all political pundits could talk about was whether or not VOX would win a seat in the regional parliament.

The party’s rallying cry to “Make Spain Great Again!”, which they announced alongside their 100-measure plan “for a living Spain” [por la España viva] at Vistalegre, took some commentators by surprise: supporters of the radical right were no longer disorganized and dispersed, but could be mobilized under one roof and behind one political party. In the lead-up, the polls, namely that administrated by Spain’s national polling agency,² estimated that, at best, VOX would take one seat in the Andalusian regional parliament. The polls, however, failed to estimate the latent support for the ultra-nationalist party, whose electoral gains were bolstered by their dominance over the issue of national unity and the defence of the Spanish nation against internal and external threats in the form of (pro-Catalan independence) secessionists and immigrants, respectively. Just two months after the Vistalegre rally, VOX surpassed the polls and won 11 per cent of the popular vote and 12 out of 109 seats in the Andalusian parliament. Spanish exceptionalism (Alonso and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2015) had come to an end.

One year later, in October 2019, Vistalegre II Plus Ultra³ took place with VOX only a few short weeks away from consolidating its expanding position to become the third largest party in Spain. Greeted by shouts of “Long live Spain!” [Viva España!], the party’s leader and president, Santiago Abascal, alongside his four henchmen – Iván Espinosa de Los Monteros, Rocío Monasterio, Javier Ortega Smith, and Jorge Buxadé Villalba – were introduced by Spanish songs interpreted by a collection of famous artists. The party conference attracted more than 12,000 people; the party promised to defend and love the nation. Before Vistalegre I, VOX, the party leader and his four henchmen were barely known to the wider population. Shortly after Vistalegre II, VOX would become Spain’s third largest party and a key right-wing government-supporting partner across different layers of government in Spain’s multilevel governance structure, and Santiago Abascal, alongside his inner circle, would all become household names.

What happened: explaining the rise of VOX

So how did we get here? The birth of VOX predates 2018 with the party establishing itself in 2013 as a result of an internal split from the mainstream right-wing party, the People’s Party [Partido Popular] (PP). 2017, one year before VOX’s virgin success in 2018, is, however, undeniably when political events in Spain lit the flame that would embolden VOX and bring it out of the electoral wilderness. One year before VOX’s infamous mass rally in Vistalegre I, Spain entered uncharted constitutional territory when the regional government in Catalonia unilaterally declared independence from Spain following the results of an unauthorized plebiscite on Catalan self-determination. The territorial conflict between proponents and opponents of decentralized decision-making and governance is nothing new in Spanish politics (Dowling, 2018; Gray, 2020): political parties at the national and subnational levels have long danced around the issue, leaning to leniency and opposition to sub(national) party agendas that best suit their own governing ambitions (Field, 2014).

What marks the events of 2017 apart, however, is that the actions of the regional government in pursuing its secessionist agenda, violating both the regional laws (Estatuto de Autonomía) and the Spanish Constitution, and the response of the government in seeking to i) squash participation in the unauthorized plebiscite by force, and ii) dismantle the regional government and impose direct rule from Madrid, aided to engender further polarization and heightened territorial tensions across the country (Simón, 2020; 2021).

VOX, much like one of Spain’s earlier party entrepreneurs, Citizens [Ciudadanos] (Cs),⁴ leveraged popular concerns over the issue of regional statehood and the ambitions of independent statehood of the Catalan government to enter the political arena. VOX built upon its unapologetic Spanish nationalism and its reliance on national symbols to present itself as the sole political party disposed to advocate, with sufficient aggression, the unity of Spain.

The message of being “tough on Catalonia” played out well for the party. Their inaugural success in the Andalusian elections, which brought 36 years of socialist-led rule in the region to an end, was in large part attributed to the fact that the second-order elections became, to an important extent, a quasi-plebiscite on the national government’s handling of the Catalan crisis. The data on this is clear: those who wanted devolution to be reduced or reversed were significantly more likely to support VOX (Turnbull-Dugarte, 2019). One of the main strategies adopted by mainstream parties to diminish electoral opportunities of emerging challengers is to lean into their “competency advantage” gained from their experience in government (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020). The competency advantage of government experience, however, requires demonstrated successes to signal competency and, in the case of Catalonia, the responses of successive governments have remained wanting. VOX’s stance on the question of devolution and its treatment of secessionism was therefore a particularly effective wedge issue with which it was able to attack all of the established parties, as no left- or right-leaning government had been able to resolve the issue.

Shortly after VOX’s maiden success in Andalusia, on 10 February – alongside the other right-wing parties – VOX called for the now infamous Demonstration for the Unity of Spain, which took place on Madrid’s well-known Colón square.⁵ The rally, organized by the three right-wing parties in response to what they penned as the socialist-led government’s “betrayal” of Spain, called for the resignation of Pedro Sánchez’s government (Forrest, 2019). When Catalan regionalist parties refused to back the government’s budget bill in February (they conditioned their support to the celebration of a legitimate independence referendum in Catalonia), the Prime Minister, of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party [Partido Socialista Obrero Español] (PSOE), called for new elections. Only five days had elapsed since the Colón rally. The results of the 28 April polling day are well known: VOX achieved nearly 2.7 million votes or 10.26 per cent of the ballots cast and took home 24 of the 350 seats in the Spanish Congress. VOX entered national level representative institutions for the first time.

From the initial success in December 2018 and its eruption into the national parliament in April the party has gone from strength to strength. The inability of the PSOE to gather enough support from other parties on either the left (Unidas Podemos), the right (Cs), or among the other minor parties needed in order to form a government led to a repetition of Spain’s general elections in November. One year and one month since they first gained electoral representation (beyond the 22 testimonial councillors in the 2015 local elections), VOX overtook the support enjoyed by Spain’s other two new parties and emerged as the third largest political force, only after the PP and the PSOE.

VOX has made it into the mainstream of Spanish politics. The party currently boasts 52 out of 350 MPs in Spain’s national Congress and has supported the formation of several PP-led governments at the regional level, namely those in the Madrid, Murcia, and Andalusia regions, and at the local level, such as those in the cities of Madrid, Santander, and Córdoba, via a number of confidence and supply agreements. VOX’s rise is clear, but what type of party is VOX?

VOX as a populist radical right party

The categorization of populist radical right parties is controversial. We maintain, like the vast body of empirical literature, that VOX belongs to the populist radical right (Mudde, 2019; Mendes and Dennison, 2021; Norris, 2020; Ri...