Until this year, the extreme right was a political and ideological sector with little or no institutional representation – city councils, regional parliaments, Congress and Senate – in Spain. It was a strange situation when observing the rise that this political tendency was having in the rest of Europe.
The long desert crossing
The existence of parties with this ideology was verifiable from the Transition stage (see attached table referring to the most significant ones), but their relevance was insignificant and their weight and social transcendence irrelevant.
Apart from the aforementioned groups, there are or were other less significant ones, sometimes limited to a municipal area or to a single province, showing the importance of aspects such as personality or the roots of the candidates when it comes to presenting themselves or not in the various constituencies. In this regard, some authors speak of three great centers of the extreme right in Spain:Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. The constellation of groups is wide:Authentic Falange (FE), Spanish Alternative (AES), National Alliance (AN), Independent Spanish Falange –student-based and can be considered as the Falangist left–, etc. His disunity was both one of his biggest handicaps and also one of his most characteristic traits.
The party that perhaps could have channeled a process of union and formation of these groups was Fuerza Nueva after its electoral “success” in 1979. It would have followed the model of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. Its leader, Blas Piñar, was a congressional deputy who emerged from the first democratic elections. The ideological principles upheld by this party were the same ones that had served to justify the military uprising of July 1936, the start of the Civil War and, therefore, its ultimate intention was to reverse the democratic process begun in Spain. Among these postulates we can mention:a radical Spanish nationalism, National Catholicism and some Falangist principles. His connections with violent groups – terrorists we would say today – are documented; Thus, the so-called Guerrillas of Christ the King had among their ranks some members of this party. The reasons for its failure are explained by Xavier Casals:the competition with the Popular Alliance for the same sector of the electorate, the lack of a defined strategy and its relationship with political violence. The failure of the military coup of February 1981 annulled any possibility of gaining power by military means, one of the ideas with which the FN played. This failure caused a flight of its most qualified militancy. For this reason, its social base was reduced to positions in the Francoist State apparatus, already of a certain age, and to young people with a strong ideological burden but no political experience.
The fragmentation, the distancing from the instruments of institutional power and an ideological burden that is not at all contrasted with social reality, also prone to personalism and absurd divisions, explain the proliferation of these parties and groups. Until recently, their presence and performances were anecdotal and their convening power was very low.
In Spain, for obvious reasons, the extreme right has its roots in the Franco regime. But, once this disappeared, he did not know how or did not want to adapt to the new democratic political reality. This explains its gradual collapse in the elections of the seventies and eighties of the last century. It also serves to understand the difficulties that, until now, his recovery posed. There may be three main reasons:
- The vast majority of the social base that made up the political apparatus of Franco understood that the ideological and political message that the regime had maintained was unviable once the dictator had disappeared. I seek then, with the aim of staying in power or as close as possible to it, the creation of political parties comparable from a democratic perspective and that, with the corresponding financial and international support, would be able to participate with guarantees in the electoral processes. in progress. It should not be assumed that this turn was always led by cynicism or the desire for power; it is also very possible that many changed their ideas in a sincere way. In any case, these sectors knew how to create two platforms that ended up representing what we can call the centre-right:Adolfo Suárez's UCD and the Popular Alliance, born as a federation of small parties led by politicians of Francoist origin –Cruz Martínez Esteruelas, Federico Silva , Laureano López Rodó, etc.–. The personality of Manuel Fraga, their undisputed leader, ended up imposing itself on all of them. Therefore, the most right-wing sectors of the regime renounced the extreme right-wing formations to represent their interests and sought accommodation, especially in the Popular Alliance.
- The middle and working classes outside the Franco regime were also very far from supporting parties that defended the essence of the dictatorship. The memory of these social sectors, including those who were not active in left-wing parties or unions, and the desire to leave behind both the Civil War and the dictatorship, prevented them from having any relationship with those who identified with the most radical sectors of the regime. In a similar direction, the growing secularization of society acted, which made it difficult to accept national-Catholicism, one of its main offers. These factors immunized the popular sectors against any flirtation with these groups for quite some time.
- The appearance between 1989 and 2000 of various political leaderships of characters of great media ascendancy, representative of a right-wing populism:José María Ruiz Mateos and Jesús Gil. It would be about comparable phenomena –in terms of modes of action, not in terms of potentiality– with the case of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Their political platforms, however weak, drew support from far-right groups
In conclusion, with hardly any political or sociological margin, the evolution of these parties was doomed to isolation and insignificance. Neither the massive arrival of immigrants to Spain from the year 2000, nor the growing inequality, nor the serious social deterioration driven by the Great Recession that began in 2008 served to fuel the growth of these groups, as it did in other European countries.
The beginning of the changes
However, it was not possible for these formations to avoid the great challenges that Spanish society was facing as of the new century. Thus, from the year 2000, some new groups emerged –Plataforma per Catalunya, España 2000, Hogar Social– that gradually set aside the more purely Francoist ideological traits to adapt their discourse to these new realities. Immigration begins to be criticized, especially that of Muslim origin, which is accused of intolerance and lack of desire to adapt. The crisis of the Welfare State, which forces to reduce the resources dedicated to aid and social benefits, is used to propose the prioritization of Spaniards over immigrants. Their actions also change:food distributions only to the natives, occupation of empty buildings to accommodate homeless Spaniards, etc… Some actions very similar to those that Golden Dawn carried out in Greece or the Pound House in Italy. Despite this change in strategy and even in ideological make-up, his electoral achievements remained minimal; Platform for Catalonia no longer stood for municipal elections in 2015 and Hogar Social acted as a social movement.
The elephant in the china shop.
Writing the end of this entry one day after the Andalusian regional elections on December 2, it is necessary to talk about the rise of VOX. A very recently created party –2013– that was already able to stand in the 2014 European elections and in which its list obtained 246,833 votes (1.57% of the total), without obtaining any deputy. It is true that in the two general elections –2015 and 2016– in which its leader, Santiago Abascal, who had been a member of the PP like other party leaders, ran, the results did not go his way, hovering around the 0.20% of the votes.
VOX's political ideology focuses on several elements:an open defense of the unity of Spain for which they propose the suppression of autonomies; the regeneration of politics through an independent judiciary; the defense of the traditional family and the prohibition of abortion (for which they propose the repeal of the current law on sexist violence); anti-Muslim xenophobia and the recovery of Spanish greatness and identity. Its economic program has been described as liberal, which distances it from other existing interventionist examples on the European populist right – the National Front, for example. He even appears less anti-European than many of his fellow Europeans. Therefore, it cannot be affirmed that VOX is linked to Francoism or is a neo-Francoism. His postulates are those of the European and contemporary radical or populist right, the same as those proposed by other European groups, some in power, or characters such as Bolsonaro in Brazil or Trump in the United States, not in vain VOX has contacted Steve Bannon , one of the electoral strategists who led Trump to his victory.
Its relevant result in the Andalusian elections and its promising political prospects –significant increase in militancy and good results in recent electoral polls– introduce an unknown variable in the Spanish political panorama.
Why now?
The question we can ask ourselves is:why is a political force of these characteristics gaining momentum now? Without a doubt, the answer lies in the confluence of reasons:
- The existence of an important sector of traditional right-wing voters "angry" with the autonomous model of the State and in favor of recentralizing it.
- A clear rejection of the “benevolent” attitude of the PP –and even more so of the PSOE, of course– with the Catalan independence challenge and what has been interpreted as continuous blackmail and legal contempt by these parties. One nationalism feeds the other.
- The crisis of the PP. A party-shelter of the entire right for a long time that is immersed in a continuous predicament due to its endless cases of corruption, due to some of its policies seen as not very right-wing, and due to its difficulties in facing a far-reaching transformation that would transform it into a modern right. A party that begins to present too many leaks. In this trance, its militancy and its voters tend to look for new forces:Citizens first and now VOX.
- The visibility that the immigration issue has gained and the double error of the two main parties:in the PP for assuming it and further fueling the fire, exaggerating its importance; in the PSOE for systematically denying it. Neither of them have managed to address the issue. Following other paths, already trodden, it was inevitable that the issue would enter the campaign.
- The errors of some sectors of the left, not only political but also intellectual or media, who believed that demonizing the new adversary or disqualifying him with four hackneyed epithets was enough. These sectors ignored the existence of problems that were relevant to many Andalusians. As Manuel Cruz affirms:«when the problems are authentic they are not right-wing or left-wing. What are from the right or left are the solutions»
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