Vox, the bullfighter, the anthem and culture
What is the PP really giving away in return for shot-term power sharing deals?
I wrote last year about Vox’s new far-right worldview, in their own words, when they organised a global MAGA get together in Madrid. Like similar movements in other countries, they have a selective, exclusive, simplistic, populist view of national identity, history and culture, and a certain way of conceptualising what we might call a “good, ideal Spaniard”, against whom all the rest are immigrants, communists, leftists, terrorists and separatists that need to be fought against and beaten in some way. Vox has a more epic, romantic, ego-pleasing way of presenting this idea, which is mostly seen on Twitter and their social media accounts, and a more down-to-earth, cheesy, embarrassing local version which you can see if you go and observe a Vox rally somewhere.
Abascal’s party rose to prominence on the back of Catalan separatism between 2017 and 2019 but has spent five years pushing the Overton Window much further to the right with xenophobic rhetoric against immigrants or what we might label as a very traditional Catholic approach to family and education, which contrasts with the ideological excesses of a the very progressive woke ideas on the far-left, especially on key crossover issues like LGBT rights, the education of children or aborion.
The new global alt- or far-right mixed with a long-existing social base of national Catholism in Spain that held an overt, dominant position during the Franco dictatorship but for most of the modern period was tucked inside the conservative Popular Party. We are looking at Spain’s new version of the culture wars. Words, images, frames, ideas and stories that are shared and promoted among different voters and groups in a society, finding more or less favour at one moment or another, and leading to actions and habits and attitudes that are more inline with one view than another over time, and that thus become normalised or acceptable when previously they were not. The ideas also become more institutionalised—in terms of actual government power as well as broader media attention—as the attention and (social) media snowball continues to roll.
So there is nothing innocent or irrelvant at all in the PP and Vox in Valencia deciding to appoint a bullfighter as regional culture minister, or the PP and Vox down the road in Elche deciding to sign their deal in front of a village church, or Vox in Catalonia now demanding that Town Hall sessions begin with the playing of the national anthem. Levante EMV reports that Vox has been given the “symbolic” regional ministries in Valencia (Culture, Justice & Policing, and Agriculture) but that the PP will still control 95% of the budget.
Tomorrow, Town and City Halls across Spain will formally elect their new leaders, based on the results of the local elections on May 28. PSOE spokesman Gómez de Celis has called it “a black Saturday for Spanish democracy”. The PP, he said, “has put an arsonist in charge of the forests” in almost 200 towns and cities where there will be a power sharing deal between conservatives and the far-right: “it will be the most ultra-conservative policies that have a direct influence on voters’ lives”. Is it right that a party with 13 or 14 or 15% of the vote gets to impose its more extreme cultural vales on all, when most people did not vote for them, becuase the more centrist right-wing party needs their support to govern? Does the PP realise what that does in the medium term, against its own political interests, to electoral psychology and rhetoric?
“Symbolic” regional ministries, or national ones after the July general election if we end up with a conservative-far-right coalition, will allow Vox to generate even more media exposure and normalisation for their exclusive ideology over the next four years. Spain faces even more polarisation.
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Spanish politics has always been dirty, edging to violence, if not physically, then certainly pshycologically. The deals being done by the PP are almost certainly lead to their own downfall further down the line.