Choose your extremism: PP-Vox or PSOE-Bildu

Reconquest, bullfighters and virgins or woke separatist terrorist destruction

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The Popular Party, on the right, is selling a tale to its supporers that the devil is called the Spanish Socialist Party and Bildu, that the socialists and the terrorist separatists are going to destroy Spain and turn the bits that are left, once the Plurinational State of the Enemies of the Kingdom has been established, or once independence of the Basque Country and Catalonia has just been handed over, into a woke feminist republic that sullies the innocence of children’s education, that is open to all immigrants who want to turn up in a small boat on a beach somewhere, and that does not intend to work more than four hours a week while it spends billions of euros it doesn’t have on fanciful ideological nonsense and drowns businessmen, owners and the rich in ever more demanding taxes and suffocating new rules invented by an evil freedom-hating globalist plot.

The Socialist Party, on the left, is selling a tale to its supporters that the devil is called the Popular Party and Vox, that conservatives and the far-right are going to shut Spain up in a cloistered convent again while everyone sings the Francoist hymn Cara al Sol on trips to watch bullfights every evening, as they recentralise power already transferred to Catalan and Basque friends, destroy progress on LGTB rights, promote violence against women, ignore global 21st Century problems like climate change or immigration, get everyone caught up in baseless conspiracy theories that have no roots in science or reason, and again submit workers to the economic oppression of bosses, owners and the rich who are signing up for the new international, anti-liberal, nationalist, racist, exclusive, anachronical plot.

While the exaggerated tales might seem far-removed from the real life of the ordinary citizen, who only wants to enjoy life a little more as he struggles with the tedious bureaucracy that corresponds to his station in life, both sides constantly supply ammunition that feeds the ideological frames and terrifying narratives of the other side. Rufián (Esquerra) is indeed demanding more Catalan independence in exchange for continuing to support Sánchez. Abascal (Vox) has indeed been to see Orban in Budapest where they congratulated each other on “the reconquest” and promised to charge together against Europe. Otegi and Bildu, who included 44 convicted terrorists in their electoral lists in May, have said that a national PP-Vox government will produce industrial quantities of Basque and Catalan separatists. In Valencia, the PP and Vox have rushed to appoint a bullfighter as regional culture minister, to sign agreements in front of churches and to order LGTB flags taken down as soon as they took control of City Hall, to be replaced by statues of virgins. Each side rails against the other, builds the other up as the terrifying enemy and lives its own version of “Spain” with absolute conviction. Both sides feed off each other but now the rational centre, that acted as a counterweight against even more polarisation and emotional anger, is gone. There are five weeks until voters decide on July 23.

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