Spain is among the western European countries hardest hit by the corona virus. By mid-May, the country had more than 270,000 COVID-19 infections, and more than 27,000 dead from the disease. Madrid metropolitan area accounted for a third of all deaths, Catalonia for a further fifth. Against that, Andalusia, Spain’s most populous autonomous community, accounted for a mere five percent of all deaths. However, estimates are that the toll could be much higher than official figures suggest.
Conventional wisdom was that given Spain’s long history of right-wing dictatorship under Generalissimo Franco, the country was largely immune to radical right-wing populist temptations. And for a long time – with a few short-lived exceptions, most notably the populist adventure of the former president of Atletico Madrid, the late Jesús Gil y Gil, who in 1991 was elected mayor of Marbella and founded his very own political party, named G.I.L. (Gruppo Independiente Liberal) - this largely held true. Only recently the country saw the emergence of a radical right wing populist party with the spectacular rise of Vox. This rise started in the regional election in Andalusia where the party won 12 seats, which propelled it into the national limelight. A few months later, Vox garnered 10 percent of the vote in the first of 2019’s two general elections; in the year’s second election – following the collapse of negotiations on the left - in November 2019, Vox became the third largest party, more than doubling its seats in parliament.
What differentiates populist parties in general, and radical right-wing populist parties in particular, is that they appeal primarily to a range of emotions – anger, indignation, nostalgia and especially resentment. Radical right-wing populist parties derive their appeal to a large extent from their ability to mobilize resentment against “the left.” There is a universal radical right-wing populist narrative that charges, as the prominent Dutch leader of the Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet, has insisted, that the left – intellectual, cultural, political – since as far back as the 1960s has consistently pursued a strategy aimed at destroying “bourgeois society, bourgeois traditions, the bourgeois way of life of ordinary people” and thus finally establish the egalitarian “utopia” which informed all self-proclaimed progressive movements since the French Revolution.
