“Police confirms: Mallorca thugs are Leipzig hooligans“: This headline – caused by two henchmen of the extreme right hooligan scene of the Leipzig-based club 1. FC Lokomotive Leipzig (Lok Leipzig) – was the most recent one to cause massive repercussions in public and media. Both men attacked a Senegalese bouncer during a disco attendance at… Continue reading ““A past still present?”: Lokomotive Leipzig and its fan scene”
Education is being used as a dividing instrument as various political coalitions seek to distort curriculums to fit their agendas. Last 5th September, on the eve of the beginning of the school year in Spain, the executive director of the Federation of Guilds of Editors of Spain, Antonio María Ávila, reported publicly the amount of pressures schoolbooks… Continue reading “In Spain, A Perversion Of Textbooks To Fit Political Objectives”
The far-right party’s behaviour has been very controversial, to say the least, in many aspects concerning women’s issues. On the 3rd of September, 2019 a political delegation from Iran visited the Spanish congress. The Iranian protocol dictated that men could not shake hands with women. Because of these requirements, the far-right party VOX announced that they… Continue reading “VOX and the rhetoric of gender violence”
Last Sunday’s elections saw far-right party Vox doubling its seats to become the third largest political force in the Spanish parliament, in line with other European far-right parties. Catalonia, immigration and Franco are some of the reasons why. Spain seems to be experiencing a déjà vu, as socialist party PSOE has won the elections but… Continue reading “The end of Spanish exceptionalism”
Those who defend statues meant to assert dominance have yet to learn the lessons of the past. In 1975, on a satirical newscast on the American television show Saturday Night Live, mock reporter Chevy Chase announced Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s death for the better part of a year, reminding audiences that the dictator was ‘still… Continue reading “The memory of Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still alive”
Flags are one of the most recognisable cultural artefacts that identify any community since they confer social cohesion to the group (Reichl 2004, Knowlton 2012,Leone 2018). The semiotic relevance of flags is evident, as they become an expression of a collective experience therefore constructing communities and eliciting multiple emotional and pragmatic responses. Flags construct a… Continue reading “On inclusive and exclusive flags”
VOX knows how important young people are for their political goals so they cherish and pamper their junior supporters. During the first conference organised by the Centre of the Analysis of the Radical Right in London last May, Cas Mudde in his wonderful plenary drew our attention to the relationship between the Radical Right and… Continue reading “Beers for Spain and Instagram: VOX and the youth vote”
Attacking the symptom (i.e., the populist radical right) is not going to do the trick – not in Spain, not in the rest of (western) Europe. Last week’s parliamentary election marked a turning point in post-Franco Spanish politics. For the first time since Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, a party clearly… Continue reading “Saviours of the nation? – on the breakthrough of the radical populist right in Spain”
The separatist conflict in Catalonia saw VOX emerge to stardom overnight, just by arguing for Spain’s monolithic National Us. VOX is the most impactful radical right political party in Spain for decades. It has been energetically rejecting the label of ‘far’, ‘extreme’ or ‘radical right’ since its birth in late 2013. Key representatives of VOX… Continue reading “Spain’s radical right VOX party in their own words”
Only time will tell if Vox’s rise is borne of disappointment with the country’s political process, or whether there is a real solidarity with the movement’s ideological principles. In recent years, Spain’s political system has gone through a number of convulsions. The traditional alternation in government between the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish… Continue reading “Is a New Style of Politics Coming to Spain?”