The worldview of Vox and the new global radical right in their own words

Is it all a normal traditional conservative reaction to the rise of the global left or a new xenophobic authoritarian Christian movement that wants to undo the global economic order?

• They like: control, exclusion, identity, God, Christianity, tradition, history, folklore, borders, nations, sovereignty, protectionism, family, “us” , other traditional Christians, the old days

• They don’t like: “millions” of illegal African, Arab and Muslim immigrants, historical facts that spoil their stories, global elites, Brussels bureaucrats, Von der Leyen, China, the global left, woke multiculturalism, social engineering, gender laws

• Trump, Cruz, Meloni, Orban, Uribe, Kast, Morawiecki, Abascal

• “We are everything but monsters”, promised Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

A major part of the Vox festival last weekend in Madrid was an hour-long propaganda play produced by Vox for the crowd and YouTube that acted out their favoured political version of the history of Spain. A grandad character convinces a sick-kid character to stop playing video games for a bit— “books were our Netflix”—and meet some of Vox’s favoured Spanish heroes of old with him to hear tales of “blood, heroes and miracles” in which Spain always comes out victorious and glorious thanks to “the cross and Christian faith” or “the cross of victory”, etc. “It took eight centuries to kick them [Muslims] out”, says the grandad: “eight centuries of great lords”. The whole Al-Andalus period of Spanish history is thrown out, only serving as an antagonistic device for the rest of the heroic tale. “We couldn’t fail, we held the cross of victory”, says the dodgy Pelaguis character on stage. Spain, the cross, Christianity, faith and victory all fit nicely into Vox’s narrative to encourage you to vote for Abascal at the general election next year. According to the Vox version, after an hour of historical brainwashing, the sick kid gives up on the video games because the friendly grandad has convinced him that the Vox version of the history of Spain is more interesting. Oh, sick voter, cure thyself of the ills of globalist 21st Century technology by seeing and believing anew in the healthy Christian light of centuries-old Spain! Vox thus proposes nothing less than a reactionary Enlightenment. Instead of illuminating a path towards a better and more modern future for all, the new national populist radical right is shining its torch towards a more exclusive and restricted identity club that was better off in the fifteenth century.

If that reminds you of other national populist radical right parties and movements you know or have read about in other countries, you’d be right. This year, as well as messages or speeches from Ted Cruz (US, senator), Meloni (Italy, Prime Minister in waiting), Orban (Hungary, Prime Minister), Morawiecki (Poland, Prime Minister), Uribe (Colombia, former President) and Kast (Chile), Abascal got personal approval from Trump himself.

The former US President didn’t say much of substance in his video message, of course—”protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things”—but it was from Trump, so Vox was excited. Abascal got personal approval from the global radical right’s biggest alpha male. Want Trump in Spain? Abascal is now officially your candidate, the local branch of the new right-wing international alliance. The messages were all based on those traditional Christian values on display in the propaganda play, mixed in for the current struggle with a cast of more modern antagonists. Ted Cruz framed a struggle between the “thuggish”, “violent” and “dangerous” “global elites and the global left” and “conservative populists” like Cruz and Trump and Abascal, “good guys” who are just defending values like “God”, “country”, “family” and “freedom” and whose most recent victory was in Italy.

Meloni (Italy) wasn’t shouting angrily this time in her eight-minute edited monologue to “Spanish patriots” but instead trying to look more prime-ministerial in an office with an Italian flag behind her, chomping at the bit to start putting all of this global radical right ideology into practice in Rome: “not a minute to lose”, she said. Most of her “conservative”, “patriotic” message was spent criticising a “weak” Europe, that had spent too much time concentrating on unimportant stuff and globalised supply chains. She wants to refocus on national production with strongly defended borders and only outsource supply to a more “pragmatic” Europe or use friend-shoring or near-shoring when absolutely necessary: “we have to control what we need again”, she said. “We are everything but monsters”, she promsied at the end.

“It’s a good tradition to get together under the Spanish flag”, said Orban (Hungary), according to the subtitles Vox provided: “it’s good for our heart and our soul and becuase it gives the global liberal left a heart attack”. He also defended, like Meloni, “our traditions and our sovereignty” against “the bureacrats in Brussels” and added that Europe must defend itself and “fight” against an “invasion” of “millions of illegal immigrants” helped along by “globalist ideology” that together threaten “our way of life”, “our culture”, “our children” and “our families”.

Morawiecki (Polond) highlighted those same themes. “Today the European Union doesn’t want to remember traditions”, he said: “a small group of bureaucrats in Brussels”, “a transnational monster with no traditional values” thinks it controls everything but it is “pure fantasy” to build the continental edifice “without taking into account the identies of the past” because “sovereign nations are the ones that make up Europe”. It’s all “a chaos of values” for “future generations” because “we are all sons of Christian civilisation” and “beneficiaries of the inheritence from the greatest civilisations, the Christian civilizations”—just like in the Vox propaganda play with the friendly grandad and the sick kid—“I’m not going to apologise for being Polish, I am Christian”. Who or what is at imminent risk due to all of these elitist, global, migratory threats? “Our houses in Poland and in Spain are in danger”, said the Polish Prime Minister, so “we are going to protect” “our houses”, “our homes”, “our homelands” and “our countries”.

Abascal (Spain) started off by saying he would have loved to be Polish if he hadn’t been Spanish. Poland, that great country that saved Europe…"in 1683”! That Europe that “held back the Turk”. Poland, the country the great Christian and great anti-communist Pope John Paul II was from. Poland, birthplace of the Solidarity trade union whose name Vox has now used for its own trade union in Spain. “The bureaucrats in Brussels”, laughed the Vox leader: “what a tiny, ridiculous enemy!” compared to those that Poland has vanquished in the course of its history. “The situation is serious”, he said. Spain and other nations “are on the edge of the abyss” and “ruin threatens the middle and popular classes” thanks to the globalists and the left. Where is that threat coming from? Immigrants, again: “That safe Spain we knew, where you could leave your doors open, has gone […] our homes are not safe, becuase there are squatters, we don’t have safe borders, and so are streets aren’t safe either”.

“They show contempt for our national unity”, “our sovereignty is given away”, he continued. Different governments “have betrayed their people”, “woke multinational companies” have brought “the end of prosperity for our families”. Trade unions, the media, “little separatist lords”, “Von der Leyen’s threats” and in general “bastard interests removed from Spaniards” have created a huge mess: “they have all turned their backs on Spain’s interests and the Spanish people”. The homeland has been “humilliated, ruined, invaded”. Multiculturalism and open borders have “stabbed our civilisation”. Abascal proposed a series of nine national referendums to “get democracy back from social engineering”, get rid of current gender laws and put up “secure borders and ordered immigration policies to protect our freedom, our safety and our prosperity”.

“As Spaniards, we will once again choose our own destiny”, he concluded, in “a sovereign Spain, master of our natural resources and energy, master of our destiny and able to protect our own” in the face of “oligarchs who don’t represent anyone”.

With that kind of rhetoric, like Catalan separatists, Trump and MAGA, Brexiters and other national populists before him, Abascal puports to stand and speak for “the real Spain and real Spaniards”, something presented as deeper and more authentic than the current and past generations of bureaucrats, technocrats, politicos and advisors, a tribal dog whistle that is not just pre-1970s-Transition but pre-Enlightenment, a lament for the folkloric Spaniards of old, when everything, at least in Abascal and Trump and Orban’s authoritarian imagination, was simpler and better and more glorious and they could all run around on horses with swords and crosses chasing away invading Muslims instead of having to worry about the 20th and 21st centuries’ universal human rights, multiple human identies and multile interlinked rules of law on a planet with nearly 8 billion people on it after after 300 years of modernity, reason and progress.

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