Credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty
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Never in the history of its young democracy had Spanish voters been so undecided. For the third time in four years, the country was sent to the polls in a national election. Only three weeks ago, 40% of the electorate had yet to decide which way to vote. By yesterday, though, 75% of the population had made up their minds.
Tensions were running high last week. Insults shot back and forth during the final TV debates. “Are you done lying yet?” one of the politicians said impatiently, “Then it’s my turn now.” Cue much delight on Twitter.
One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975.
For many in Spain, the growing appeal of these populists is alarming. It certainly is for the conservative Popular Party (PP), which was humiliated in the ballot as its number of seats more than halved from 137 in 2016’s vote to 66. It’s a threat too, to the other main party on the Right, Ciudadanos, which entered the Spanish parliament in 2015 with around 14% of the vote. Though it remained steady at 16% yesterday.
But those most alarmed are on the Left, particularly the centre-Left Socialist Party (the PSOE), whose leader, Pedro Sánchez, has been Prime Minister since last summer, and Podemos, the young party to the Left of the Socialists. For them, Vox represents social and political regression in its purest form and will doubtless give them a turbulent time as they try to form a coalition from a fragmented system.
Vox was founded in late 2013 by Santiago Abascal, a former official of the Popular Party and Vox’s current leader. He left the PP because he felt it was abandoning its conservative values and getting too soft on Catalan and Basque secessionism. He now refers to his former party as “the tiny, cowardly Right”.
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