The Spanish right-wing populist party VOX is a well-known ‘climate change denier’. This is why many analysts have interpreted its electoral success – the party is today the third largest in the Spanish parliament, having been founded in 2013 with the objective of defending the country’s national unity from the Catalan secessionist threat – as more evidence that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, and age in which emotion carries more weight than objective facts. A close look at the development of VOX’s climate change agenda, however, reveals a more complicated and troubling picture.
There is no question that, during most of its short history, VOX has spread misinformation about the severity of the threat of global warming, downplaying its dangers. Borrowing from the Trump playbook, the party has often cast climate change as a hoax and the environmental movement as a globalist plot against national sovereignty and prosperity. The justification of one of its MPs, Francisco José Contreras, for opposing Spain’s first Climate Change Law encapsulates the party’s dismissive attitude towards the issue. During a parliamentary session last April, Contreras remarked that global warming may turn out not to be such a bad thing because it will “reduce mortality caused by cold weather”.
Unsurprisingly, VOX critics jumped at the opportunity to make fun of the party’s doubt-mongering tactics. “Sure, and more droughts will reduce mortality caused by drowning,” a Twitter user quipped. One of the major Spanish dailies joined the fray, with an article entitled ‘One, Great, and Warm’, a play on Franco’s nationalist motto “Una, Grande y Libre” (One, Great, and Free).
