Vox, Olona, leadership errors and the 2023 general election in Spain
Destructive rivalries, incompetent management, bad strategic choices. Vox is not learning the lessons provided by Podemos and Ciudadanos over the past 10 years.
At the last general election in Spain in 2019, Vox won 3.6 million votes and 52 seats in parliament, about 15% of the total. That is more than both Podemos (3.2 million, 42 seats, 13%) and Ciudadanos (3.5 million, 40 seats, 14%) took at the 2015 general election, when they were all the rage as the country then recovered very slowly from the last financial crisis and all that unemployment. That’s a lot of voter hopes and expectations to try to manage, as well as regional party logistics, the selection of new MPs loyal to the leader and the first scandals that erupt along the way.
Both Podemos and Ciudadanos have since lost voter appeal and both of their leaders (Pablo Iglesias and Albert Rivera) long ago left the field now to try other projects in life, after getting different parts of the Spanish electorate excited about the possibility of their forming a government one day. Podemos has splintered after suffering internal structural problems at the leadership level several times—the latest offshoot being the Deputy Prime Minister’s new electoral vehicle that she is calling Sumar (“Add Up”)—and is down to about 10% of the vote in the polls. Ciudadanos will be lucky if it survives with any MPs at all at the general election in 2023 under whatever Inés Arrimadas understands as leadership at this point.
Both of those parties also meant to reform or revolutionise in some manner the existing mostly two-party system that had ruled the roost since the Transition in the 1970s. Both have failed in that attempt. The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) is still on about 25% of the vote and the centre-right Popular Party—under new leader Feijóo for the past six months—is up to around 30%. Neither close to a majority again yet but both still defending their turf in an acceptable manner. Which brings us to Vox, the next new national party to appear over the past 10 years and the one whose turn it is to challenge the status quo.
Since Feijóo took over the PP, Abascal’s gang have been beset by problems. Three are worthy of note.
First, there is their regional leader and now Deputy First Minister in coalition with the PP in Castilla y León, Juan García Gallardo. Nobody knew who he was when he became the regional candidate all of seven months ago just before those elections, and he appears not have a specific function in the regional executive apart from being the local Vox boss but he was deemed to be from the right traditional conservative identity crowd up there and now seems to have enraged all the other parties to the extent that last week all pretence of parliamentary politeness was abandoned by MPs in the regional chamber in their exchanges with him, with everyone insulting everyone else, and the Speaker suspended the session with “Fuck ‘em”.
Second, there were the lackluster results in the regional elections in Andalusia in June. Although they improved their results slightly, from 12 to 14 seats in the regional chamber, they did not fulfil the energetic expectations they themselves had created among voters, as they always do, with their reasonably slick social media videos and populist rants against one group or another. Voters returned a comfortable overall majority for the PP leader Juanma Moreno. The Vox candidate in the Andalusia elections, approved by the national leadership, parachuted in from Madrid for the campaign, was Macarena Olona.
Olona is now the third big problem for Vox.
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