Scene 1. Vox event in Seville, March 2015. In Asunción street, in Los Remedios, Santiago Abascal stands on a bench to ask with a megaphone for the vote for the unity of Spain in the Andalusian regional elections a few days later. With a shirt peeking out from the collar of his brown sweater, he seems to blend in with the aesthetics of the quintessential right-wing upper-middle-class neighborhood, where the Vox leader barely attracts the attention of a handful of passers-by.
Scene 2. Vox event in Madrid this month. In an auditorium in Aluche, a neighborhood whose composition is marked by the migratory waves of development and a long history of neighborhood struggles, a young man with a scruffy appearance, with an earring in his ear, takes the stage. In front of the crowd, he gives a speech that begins with praise of the “fractious” neighborhoods, continues with praise of the “working classes,” moves through nostalgia for the times when the “children of the working class” thrived, and ends with a diagnosis of the real estate market. Madrid, he says, has become the “backyard of the world’s rich”, because the PP and PSOE have rolled out the “red carpet for the funds” and the “vultures”. Faced with the “consensus of the streets”, he complains, there is an “oligarchy” that “has transformed a right into a true luxury”.
Ten years passed between the two scenes, those between a party that wanted to break into Spanish politics by going to a PP fiefdom with a Spanishist speech against processesthe third force of the Congress, which is emerging in the polls with an anti-political and xenophobic message and still aspires to grow further through the use of multiple resources taken directly from the usual lexicon of the alternative left, in particular from Podemos, especially in its first phase.
In the usual speech of the young man with the earring, Carlos Hernández Quero (Madrid, 34 years old), spokesperson for Vox Housing, there is much of that repertoire: the “streets”, the “squares” and the “neighborhoods” as places of forging a “common sense” that transcends ideologies, the “elites” as the incarnation of the bad. But the podemization It doesn’t end here. Vox leaders rail against “casteism” and “bipartisanship” on a daily basis. The newer the leader, the clearer the script. Green policies are, the Vox leader in Madrid, Isabel Pérez Moñino, said in October, a plundering of the “bipartisan caste” by the “working classes”.
That populist streak, which hides the ultra-conservative core behind rhetoric with a left-wing touch, is not new to Vox. There have even been threats to fight for 15M’s legacy, as with the 2020 “15M, we remain outraged” campaign. But it was a narrow vein, made up of secondary elements. Not anymore, now it’s the main one. “There has been an attenuation of the more liberal elements, such as tax cuts, which take a back seat,” says Ismael Seijo, a political science researcher at the University of Barcelona, who has studied the evolution of Vox’s discourse on housing, the lack of which the party attributes to immigration, thus managing to combine the two problems that most worry Spaniards according to the CIS.
Because, according to Seijo, the entire logic of this change at Vox is electoral. “To govern you need the popular classes and the impoverished middle classes,” he underlines. And for this reason, he adds, he integrates the anti-immigration discourse with that “anti-establishment”which in the case of housing translates into a “very filtered” criticism of the economic elite “targeting foreign funds”, without targeting Spanish capital.
The transformation of Vox into what some call a party reddish-brown -with ultra-conservative values, anti-establishment clothing and workerist winks- he has surpassed a series of milestones. In 2020, the party created its own union, Solidarity. A phenomenon had already begun in the last legislature which culminated after the 2023 elections: the sector personified by the former Falangist candidate Jorge Buxadé was gaining weight, to the detriment of figures from the ultraliberal wing such as the former speaker Iván Espinosa de los Monteros or the former deputies Víctor Sánchez del Real and Rubén Manso.
During the rise of the fundamentalist sector, Revuelta was born, a youth group linked to Vox which made the motto “only the people save the people” its motto. One of his references, Pablo González, presents himself as a defender of the “workers” and criticizes the “bourgeoisie”. This is also part of the classic rhetoric of the former leader of the neo-Nazi Republican Social Movement party Jordi de la Fuente, who in March was appointed general secretary of Solidarity, where he presents himself as an “angry worker” in defense of the “working class”.
A decisive milestone: in 2024, Vox breaks with the European group of conservatives and reformists, that of the Italian Giorgia Meloni, and joins Patriots for Europe, of the Hungarian Viktor Orbán and the French Marine Le Pen, the ultra leader “most open in her rhetoric in favor of the State and workers”, at the helm of a party that also adopts “a strong anti-globalization discourse” since Le Pen Sr. leads it, explains the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, professor at the University of Georgia, USA, and far-right expert. Mudde adds that the main far-right parties in the Netherlands and Austria, including Patriotas, complete the podium of those who try most to present themselves as “defenders of social welfare”.
Contradictions
Other maneuvers by Vox, such as Abascal’s resignation from the authorities’ platform on Hispanic Heritage Day to follow the parade in Madrid among the people, are full of that impression of a party far from the “system”, another fashionable word in the party. But it was the rise of Quero, who replaced leader Javier Ortega Smith as deputy speaker of Congress, that attracted the most attention.
Son of a judge, a profession little linked to the status of “neighborhood” boy with which he presents himself, Quero has viralized a message on the house that does not move from the Vox line, aimed at blaming the immigrant and without analysis of class conflict, but which is sprinkled with words typical of the left. And that contradictions emerged. The same Vox that exalts the “worker” has opposed the repeal of dismissal due to illness or the reduction of working hours. While promoting Quero, who presents himself as a champion of “social justice”, Vox supports Javier Milei, for whom “social justice” is “aberrant”. Vox did not respond to EL PAÍS for this article.
Vox’s rising star leaves no one indifferent. From the right, Quero is criticized for using left-wing schemes. “Madrid already has its Carmeno (referring to Manuela Carmena)”, he writes in From the left, he is accused, among other things, of inconsistency for having blamed the growing housing shortage on immigration, while he proposes “a return to the real estate cycle” prior to the Great Recession “which was only possible thanks to remittances from immigrant labor”, underlines Lórien Gómez, fellow researcher of Ismael Seijo in Barcelona.
Strength in the working class
These contradictions do not stop Vox, which is not only growing in the polls, but is also becoming strong in left-wing spaces. In the last CIS, it was the party with the highest voting intention among workers in two of the six lowest paid categories: services and trade; and officers, workers and artisans – and second out of three others – agriculture; elementary occupations; and machinery operators. The party surpasses the PP in voting intentions among those who perceive themselves as lower-middle class, working class/proletariat and lower class/poor.
With experience in the comparative analysis of these parties, Cas Mudde indicates that the reason why the far right downplays the cost of its inconsistencies is that “the vast majority of its voters support it more for its sociocultural program than for its socioeconomic one”. Seijo adds that the use of immigration as a “scapegoat” helps him overcome these contradictions not only when it comes to housing, but in general about public aid, which almost always reaches – says Vox – those who “do not have the surname Martínez, García or Fernández”, in the words of Quero, a former student of ISSEP, the training school that connects Vox with the lepenism French.
The political scientist Eli Gallardo, author of The year we voted dangerously (Rapitbook, 2024), who analyzed the changes in Spanish politics caused by the parties born after the Great Recession, agrees on the importance that xenophobic discourse has for Vox in squaring the circle reddish-brown “On the other side of the ideological axis, Vox repeats part of what the first Podemos did: putting the emphasis on a black diagnosis that warms up the public, kicking the board and drawing a new one with a neo-populist discourse, setting the agenda not with proposals, but underlining the gravity of the problem and its culprits,” he underlines. Now, in the case of Vox, the main blame falls on immigrants, which constitutes the most radical difference among the many that exist with Podemos.
An extended strategy
Abascal, who gave another clue to his desire to appear transversal by introducing the former communist Ramón Tamames in his 2023 censure motion, is not inventing gunpowder with all this strategy. The use of the left’s resources is typical of the far right, including Aliança Catalana, the most European of the Spanish far right. Sometimes it is in the form of winks, provocations. If Meloni cited the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and the singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André, figures placed on the left, his compatriot Matteo Salvini opens his autobiography with a quote from the communist historian Antonio Gramsci and places the Roman headquarters of the League in via delle Botteghe Oscure, where the PCI had been based. Other times, the appropriations are deeper. Le Pen not only recruited left-wingers, such as the former Trotskyist militant Fabien Engelmann, but also relied on grammaism of the right new law grow on the left.
Despite the charm of lepenism Of Vox’s key figures such as councilor Kiko Méndez-Monasterio, Abascal remains distant from the level of development of this strategy in France. Furthermore, it seems to Cas Mudde that Vox is arriving late, after years “closed in its bubble”, without following the path taken by many forces in his family, which “started with more right-wing positions on socioeconomic issues and ended up adopting discourses of economic nationalism and welfarism”. Of course, the co-author of The far right today (Paidós, 2021) underlines that, once in power, his measures will never be “redistributive”. “They are not trying to take resources away from rich natives, but from poor immigrants, without contributing to a more egalitarian society,” he argues.
