 |
Melisa Dominguez,
the leader of Hogar Social Madrid, talking to people receiving food
handouts from the organization's soup kitchen | Diego Torres
|
No
country for old fascists
A
new generation of far-right leaders in Spain looks for their
political opening.
By DIEGO
TORRES 12/26/16, 5:30 AM CET
MADRID — Ask a
pundit or politician here why Spain is saved from the right-wing
populism sweeping across Europe and the answers stream forth. That
Spaniards show empathy for foreigners derived from their own mass
emigration in the ’60s; that it’s relatively easy to integrate
new Latin American arrivals who speak Spanish and are Christian; and
that the recent memory of fascism under Francisco Franco has inured
the country to extremism.
This conventional
wisdom may not survive the coming year.
While no far-right
party has managed to get a single lawmaker into the national
parliament or any of the 17 regional assemblies in the past three
decades, Spain looks to be as fertile ground for right-wing populism
as any other country in Europe. It just seems to be awaiting a
charismatic leader to upset the established order.
Anti-immigration and
anti-establishment sentiment — key factors driving the right-wing
revival elsewhere — are at least as strong in Spain as the rest of
Europe, according to research by Sonia Alonso and Cristóbal Rovira,
who studied opinion polls across the Continent and found no
meaningful differences.
“Spaniards are
neither less nor more intolerant than people in other European
countries,” said Rovira, a professor at Chile’s Diego Portales
University.
Anti-immigrant
sentiment has dropped down the table of Spaniards’ top concerns
since it peaked about 10 years ago. Back in 2006, Spaniards felt that
foreigners, who represented around 12 percent of the population at
the time, constituted the biggest problem facing the country. Then
came the economic crisis and bribery scandals in the main political
parties, and ordinary Spaniards became preoccupied with unemployment
and corruption.
Anti-establishment
feelings have certainly grown as a result. And it’s not that there
is no demand for a far-right party in Spain — it’s more a problem
of what’s on offer, argue Alonso and Rovira.
Cut the nostalgia
Take the example of
Vox.
On June 20 this
year, activists from the far-right party traveled to Gibraltar to
unfurl a giant Spanish flag on the rock that gives the U.K. overseas
territory off the southern coast of Spain its nickname. As an attempt
to rally Spanish nationalists to the party, the operation failed. The
party’s share of the vote, which reached 244,000 at the European
Parliament elections in 2014, had tumbled to 58,000 votes in Spanish
national elections in December 2015, and it fell further to 46,000 in
the repeat elections six months later, just after the Gibraltar
stunt.
Even so, Vox scored
five times better than the next far-right party,
Spain’s fragmented
far-right parties are largely driven by nostalgia for Franco and live
up to the stereotype: a few thousand bickering extremists who gather
to commemorate the dictator’s death carrying Francoist flags, doing
the Nazi salute and singing the Falangists anthem “Cara al sol.”
Few have tried to
rebrand themselves like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France or
Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, which has
tried to shake off fascist stereotypes and broaden its appeal,
focusing less on Nazi sympathies and more on the rejection of
migrants, especially Muslims, in its homeland.
However, there are
now signs that the Spanish far-right is catching on.
 |
Santigago Abascal,
the leader of far-right party Vox, at the party’s headquarters in
Madrid | Diego Torres
|
Santiago Abascal,
the leader of Vox who spent five years as a regional lawmaker in
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party (PP), is
critical of the trend among Spanish far-right parties to “focus
only on the past.”
Founded in 2014, Vox
at first tried to appeal to disenchanted conservatives and
traditional, Catholic PP voters by proposing anti-abortion
legislation and radical tax cuts, after Rajoy failed to deliver on
his first-term promise to lower taxes. It took a tough line on the
Catalan and Basques separatist movements and called for
constitutional reforms that would scrap the autonomous powers that
those regions already have.
After two
unsuccessful years and two electoral failures, Abascal began looking
to the National Front for inspiration. In November, he met with Louis
Aliot, the French party’s number two, and began heating up his
anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“There simply
isn’t room for everyone,” he told POLITICO in an interview at the
party’s Madrid headquarters.
 |
Melisa Dominguez,
the leader of Hogar Social Madrid | Diego Torres
|
Social fabric
Abascal isn’t the
only one to have spotted a gap in the market. Hogar Social Madrid
(Madrid Social Home, known by its initials HSM) draws inspiration
from Golden Dawn in Greece. It has gotten attention by occupying
public buildings, setting up a “Spaniards-only” soup kitchen and
advocating a radical brand of anti-immigrant, anti-liberal patriotic
welfare.
Many refuse to take
the HSM seriously, as it is still just a 150-strong, unregistered
association that has never competed in elections. But that hasn’t
stopped its young, media-friendly leader Melisa Dominguez from making
headlines and becoming the modern face of the far-right in Spain.
“We’re currently
in the phase where we create the social fabric,” said Dominguez in
the illegally occupied Madrid mansion the group has turned into its
headquarters. Speaking with POLITICO after supervising food handouts
for about 70 people, she said she sees a bigger role in Spanish
politics for far-right movements like HSM.
If that is to
happen, the right-wingers will not only have to overcome their own
strategic shortcomings and stop the infighting. They must also cope
with the biggest factor that limits their growth: the ruling Popular
Party’s largely unchallenged hegemony among far-right Spaniards. It
is estimated that more than 80 percent of people who describe
themselves as far-right voted for Rajoy in the past two national
elections.
The PP has links to
Spain’s fascist past. The party’s founder, Manuel Fraga, was a
minister under Franco and many other members of the early party
leadership came from his regime. Today, however, the party is very
similar to other mainstream center-right parties in Europe, making it
similarly vulnerable to a challenge from right-wing populists.
“We need to
acknowledge that the PP has played its hand well … and kept the
whole space on the Right and extreme Right for itself,” said Josep
Anglada, the fiercely anti-immigrant former leader of Plataforma per
Catalunya (PxC). Under his leadership in 2011 the PxC won 67 seats in
40 local councils across the region of Catalonia, the biggest success
of any such party in modern Spain. Anglada was ousted from the party
in 2014.
For Rovira at Diego
Portales University, the PP owes much of its success in maintaining
the support of extremists while promoting moderate policies to the
conflicting national identities in Spain, which have allowed the
party to appeal to right-wingers’ firm belief in national unity and
turn that into votes.
Unlike its main
center-left rivals, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE),
the PP has repeatedly been able to win national elections with little
support in Catalonia and the Basque Country. That permits the
conservatives to take stances that alienate many Catalans and Basques
while giving them a decisive advantage among voters in central Spain.
In 2006, for example, the PP mobilized citizens up and down the
country to collect signatures rejecting a new estatut (or regional
constitution) that had been approved by the Catalan parliament.
National unity is as
important for far-right voters as tough policies on immigration, said
Rovira, and the Socialists are widely seen as more likely to
compromise with the separatists than the PP.
The ponytail factor
Another peculiarity
of Spanish politics is that the secessionist push hasn’t thrown up
successful examples of far-right regional parties like the Northern
League in Italy or the Flemish party Vlaams Belang in Belgium. For
reasons that have much to do with the fact that the Franco regime was
so fiercely opposed to regional autonomy of any kind, the forces that
champion Catalan and Basque identity range from the center Right to
the radical Left.
Abascal of Vox
points to another factor he says has helped the PP maintain its
monopoly on the Right, despite the corruption cases and scandals in
the party that have angered many of its supporters: The birth in 2014
and the subsequently meteoric rise of the far-left party Podemos. Led
by the ponytailed university lecturer Pablo Iglesias, Podemos ranked
first in some national polls before settling for a disappointing
third in the last national elections.
“Many people in
the street congratulated me, but said they voted for Rajoy because
they were too afraid the ponytailed one could come to power,” said
Abascal.
Podemos’ ability
to channel much of the anti-establishment sentiment that arose from
years of economic depression and record-high unemployment also
explains the far-right’s struggle to make headway with voters. But
Podemos voters tend to be young, educated urbanites who have little
to do with the older and poorly educated rural and industrial workers
who tend to swell the ranks of the far-right across Europe —
suggesting there is still room for a charismatic, populist leader
with a right-wing message.
“We can’t allow
the far-left to monopolize the fight for social rights,” said
Dominguez of HSM, who is one of the young people who aspires to that
role.
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