Vox has decided to challenge the Little Miami by Isabel Díaz Ayuso. That is, having transformed Madrid into the paradigm of a globalized right, favorable to low taxes and attractive to Hispanic American elites with high purchasing power. Faced with this model of winners of the systemSantiago Abascal’s party now chooses to present itself as the party of those who feel they belong to them losers. The question is whether this workerist turn – which some call Phalangist – will pose a threat to the People’s Party in the long term.
The replacement of Vice President Javier Ortega Smith in Congress with MP Carlos Hernández Quero goes along these lines. The party is now removing the last vestiges of its old guard, following the departure of figures such as Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros. This was the main representative of the far-right liberal wing: it is no coincidence that he recently founded the think tank Atenea, more similar to the old Ciudadanos or the PP than to its original party. In short, we are witnessing the rise of a deputy, Hernández Quero, who could very well be in Podemos for his aesthetics or social rhetoric. The thirty-year-old from Madrid addresses the working-class neighborhoods with an anti-elite speech and criticizes the benefits that “Madrid Miami” wants to grant to foreign capital. Nor does he seem like the typical Spanish nationalist: his proposal is not to wrap oneself in the flag, but rather in the feeling of belonging to a family, a neighborhood or a community.
The space of the Spanish far right thus consumes its definitive division between liberals and identitarians, as already happened with the infamous rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Musk represented those technobros who do not want high tariffs and seek to attract skilled labor for their companies – for example, Indian engineers for Silicon Valley – while Trump was due to the base of the MAGA movement. Namely: protectionism, anti-immigration discourse, a more populist and patriotic right.
The fact is that Vox’s workerist turn is already raising blisters in the PP and in Atenea’s orbit, highlighting a weak point: the extreme dependence that the popular population has on the figure of Ayuso. If it bothers her so much that Vox questions her, it’s because the Madrid baroness has become the symbol of the alternative to the PSOE. When Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, or any other baron, talks about lowering taxes, he is referring to the methods helpers. On the other hand, it is difficult to recognize the economic paradigm of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Precisely, many far-right voters think that the current PP will be a sort of Rajoy 2.0 when it governs, a “blue PSOE” that will do the same as the left. The desire for another economic model now sublimates among citizens in difficulty, even if, in truth, Vox’s imprint on “things to eat” has so far been little noticed when he governed with the popular ones.
The problem is that the PP got nervous about Vox beforehand. Quero can be exciting in Aluche, but talking about Venezuelan or Mexican billionaires is too much of a Madrid talk: it has little to do with the reality of Extremadura, Catalonia or La Mancha. It is one of the evils of the current right: it has been looking inside the M-30 for so long that, despite having won in many autonomous communities, it seems that it does not know how to focus on the other problems that exist in our country – what to say about its break with the PNV or with Junts. However, Vox shows signs of wanting to overcome its centralism. Not only are they already taking root in the countryside, they have also begun to do so lepenize: They are the main force among workers, among young people or among the unemployed. All this while the left closes ranks around a story based on the alleged economic “miracle” of Pedro Sánchez. Even if the national economy grows in macro terms – due to the increase in the volume of workers, national or foreign, rather than due to the increase in productivity – the daily life of families is different. Severe social exclusion already affects 4.3 million people in our country, 52% more than in 2007, and job insecurity reaches 47.5% of the active population, according to the IX Report of the Foessa Foundation.
In short, a social far right is beginning to emerge that has adopted the premise that impoverishment has become structural in Spain and can only get worse. Vox has bet everything on this prediction for the coming years. To tell the truth, it is not very different from the diagnosis of the current left: in seven years of government it has been easier to recognize its policies on the minimum wage or minimum vital income so that citizens do not become even more precarious, than its actions to revive the middle class of the past.
Vox now challenges the Little Miami of Ayuso, and the tragedy is that more and more young people will look like the losers of the system rather than those who have triumphed over it. The only way Feijóo could try to stop Vox is to give a speech that inspires or makes people believe that things can fundamentally change for the better in our country’s homes. And at the moment either we don’t know, or there isn’t any.
