On the 3rd of September, 2019 a political delegation from Iran visited the Spanish congress. The Iranian protocol dictated that men could not shake hands with women. Because of these requirements, the far-right party VOX announced that they were not going to join the meeting due to the discriminatory treatment imposed on women who were relegated to a secondary role. They also found it both unacceptable and unbelievable that members from the other political parties were attending. The matter was partially solved with the cancellation of the session to avoid Spanish women politicians that embarrassing situation.
Gestures such as the one mentioned above, may lead us to think that VOX is a political force leading the defence of women’s rights. But the truth is that the behaviour of the far-right party has been very controversial, to say the least, in many aspects concerning women’s issues. Just 2 days after the incident mentioned above, VOX stated that they were not going to sign the agreement on violence against women at the City Hall of Madrid since it assumed the a priori guilt of a sector of society (i.e. men) as well as excluded any mention of the violence exerted against men, the elderly and children since it just involved a group of measures exclusively focused on violence against women.
When asked about their rejection of the agreement on the Spanish public TV channel, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, the speaker of the party in the congress, contended there are more infanticides carried out by women than by men in Spain and there is no need to talk about “gender violence” let alone to have specific laws on it. This inflammatory statement caused a great deal of infuriated reactions especially on social media. Many expressed their astonishment, frustration and rage. In fact, Espinosa de los Monteros is wrong even about the data: the figures provided by the National Institute of Statistics show that the gender of the murderer is not a relevant factor. But, what was more devastating was the use of this heinous example to justify their vilification of the law on violence against women. After all, one of VOX’s main obsessions since they burst into the political scene has been the demonization of the feminist movement.
