Spain’s Far Right Emerges as a Force by Tapping a New Nationalism

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/world/europe/spain-election-vox-abascal.html

Version 0 of 1.

MADRID — The leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, made his name as an opponent of separatism in his home Basque region. But it is the secessionist conflict in Catalonia that has provided his real opportunity.

As the Catalan turmoil confronts Spain with an existential crisis that threatens its territorial integrity, Mr. Abascal, who prides himself on owning a Smith & Wesson handgun, has presented himself as the fiercest defender of Spanish sovereignty.

That appeal has tapped into a new nationalism in Spain. Over the last 11 months, his party has gone from a non-factor to being the country’s third most powerful political force, as Vox doubled its representation to 52 seats in the 350-seat Parliament in elections on Sunday.

The election results have left Spain looking at more uncertainty and deadlock. Pedro Sánchez, the caretaker Socialist prime minister, now faces another round of complicated negotiations to form a government.

But the results also left Spain to contend with something it has not had to countenance in a long time, something more familiar to its European Union neighbors: a growing far-right presence.

Mr. Abascal, 43, emerged as the only clear winner Sunday. Vox, he said, may now push forward with what he called a “patriotic alternative,” acting as a counterweight to Catalan separatism.

That agenda not only includes strong doses of nationalism, but also the sort of xenophobic messages used by other far-right parties that have advanced elsewhere in Europe.

Until now, Spain had remained among the few European countries without a powerful far-right element, even after its two-party system turned into a much more fragmented landscape in 2015.

Since then, no single party has been close to winning a parliamentary majority. The country has faced four elections in four years. That instability, combined with the threat of Catalan secession, has provided the perfect culture for Vox to thrive.

Vox has tapped into nationalist feelings that had been long tainted by the linkage with Franco’s dictatorship, which ended in 1975, but have recently been revived by the challenge to Spanish sovereignty presented by Catalan separatists.

“The longer Spanish politics remain unstable, the more reason it gives for Catalan separatists to continue raising tensions,” said Astrid Barrio, a politics professor at the University of Valencia.

“That is a good environment for Vox,” she added.

Vox led the right wing’s condemnations of Mr. Sánchez, blaming him for allowing the Catalan political conflict to spiral into violence on the streets of Barcelona, following the recent prison sentencing by the Supreme Court of former separatist leaders.

Vox has benefited from intense media coverage, and Mr. Abascal, who broke ranks from the conservative Popular Party in 2013, made the most of his first television election debate last Monday.

As Mr. Abascal called for a return to direct rule from Madrid over Catalonia, he reminded viewers that he had risked his life fighting for the unity of Spain, as a Basque politician targeted by a terrorist campaign mounted by ETA, the separatist group.

During the debate, Mr. Abascal presented Islamic migration as a threat. Mr. Sánchez, his Socialist opponent, produced data to defend his government’s track record against illegal migration, rather than reminding Mr. Abascal that Spain protects religious freedom.

Until this year, Mr. Abascal was sometimes ridiculed in the mainstream media for some of his campaign gimmicks, including a video that showed him leading a group on horseback accompanied by triumphant music, in a re-enactment of the medieval battles waged by Spain’s Roman Catholic kings to end the Muslim occupation.

More recently, Mr. Abascal has fired back at the media. Last week, Vox closed its doors to reporters from the media group Prisa after its flagship newspaper, El País, wrote an editorial warning that Mr. Abascal’s xenophobia and other comments in the television debate “should raise all alarm bells without delay.”

Yet Mr. Abascal’s focus on migration seemed to pay off for Vox on Sunday.

Vox got seven of its parliamentary seats in Madrid, but also gained significantly in poorer agrarian regions like Andalusia and Murcia that have been the main landing spots for migrants who have reached Spain by boat from northern Africa.

Vox also benefited from the collapse of Ciudadanos, a center-right party whose parliamentary representation fell to 10 from 57 seats and whose leader, Albert Rivera, resigned on Monday.

Over the past year, both the conservative Popular Party and the anti-secessionist Ciudadanos party struggled to adjust to Mr. Abascal’s challenge, not unlike the way Donald Trump’s rise disconcerted the Republican Party in the United States.

Establishment politicians wavered between distancing themselves from him or competing with Mr. Abascal’s hard-line views, particularly toward Catalan separatism.

Vox’s rapid rise also brings new challenges of self-definition for a party that has presented itself as an anti-establishment force. It has particularly denounced corruption scandals in Mr. Abascal’s former Popular Party.

In the run-up to the election, Mr. Abascal’s campaign became “more populist, far right, with more focus on migration,” Lluís Orriols, a professor of politics at the Carlos III university in Madrid, told La Sexta, a Spanish television channel, on Monday.

“We now need to establish exactly what Vox is,” he said.

While other party leaders are now blaming each other for allowing Vox’s rise, some analysts suggested that the two traditional parties of Spain had each helped Vox.

The conservative Popular Party could have isolated Vox earlier by denouncing some of its excesses, but instead adopted part of Vox’s rhetoric, according to José Ignacio Torreblanca, who heads the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

On the other hand, Prime Minister Sánchez’s wavering over Catalonia and his exhumation last month of Franco’s corpse from his underground basilica perhaps benefited more Vox than his own Socialist party “because it reawakened the history of the civil war as a narrative of good versus bad, which is something that feels unacceptable to many people,” Mr. Torreblanca argued.

On Monday, Mr. Abascal said that his party would never help Mr. Sánchez stay in office, accusing him of failing to bring order back to Catalonia and “reviving the old hatreds among Spanish people.”

But he offered little clue about whether he would support any other government leader.

“Governance is not the responsibility of Vox,” Mr. Abascal told a news conference. “The responsibility is for those who promised during the campaign to unblock the situation.”