Ultra-party Vox were widely recognised as the biggest winners in November’s elections, more than doubling their number of seats in congress since the April vote. The presence of the far right in Spain’s parliament bears witness to the growing and emboldened wave of hard right feeling sweeping the nation. The most obvious explanation as to why Vox have been so successful in recent months is that this far right trend has never really been absent, rather cloaked as an arm of the Partido Popular and latent in the population as a whole in the era since the death of dictator Francisco Franco. But clearly, in recent months factors have conspired to offer the far right a chance to become a manifest force in the political system.
The spark that lit the fuse was Catalonia. Since the independence referendum of October 2017, politics in Spain have been polarising by the day. In the weeks preceding the referendum, Spanish nationalism found new breath. Throughout the country a proliferation of Spanish flags began to drop from windows and balconies, with proudly nationalist businesses commissioning flags of several metres in length to float above highways. In events since the referendum, positions have entrenched yet more on both sides of the Catalonian divide: the imprisonment of several high ranking Catalan politicians involved in organising the referendum; the application of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution in Catalonia, which gave the national government special powers to ‘restore order’; and ongoing protests and civil unrest. In particular, the sentencing of the Catalan politicians over the summer appears to have lit a flame beneath Vox’s political movement, with large numbers drawn to the party on the basis of its hard-line stance.
Ciudadanos unravels
In addition to this, regular returns to the polls in Spain have sped up the process of two-party system decline, with April and November’s elections representing the death knell for the dominance of the Partido Popular (PP) and PSOE. President Pedro Sanchez’s failed strategy to gain a parliamentary majority by rapidly undermining negotiations with Podemos in a series of spin-doctored moves pushing the nation towards fresh elections, has helped feed reactionary politics further.
