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”
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”
While racism and xenophobia are central to radical right ideology, there is a wave of gender discrimination sweeping radical right groups around the globe. The electoral success of the radical populist right in Western Europe is almost exclusively associated with one policy field – (im)migration and the various issues tied in with it (such as… Continue reading “The New Assault On Gender By The Radical Right”
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?”
After 1975, the remnants of Franco’s Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista were scattered across Spain, and found minimal support – despite attempts to consolidate power during the early years of the democracy. Numerous political parties aspired to claim the Falange as their own over the next forty years—most simply disappearing. In… Continue reading “Spain First: The Return of the Falange”
Since the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975, Spain has been a country without a strong radical right-wing presence. In fact, in 2017, Senior Analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute Carmen González-Enríquez declared Spain ‘inoculated’ against radical right-wing populism because of the legacy of… Continue reading “Vox and the Return of the Radical Right in Spain”