The anti-LGBTQ+, anti-feminist, climate-denying Vox party could gain a foothold in the Spanish government as a result of this election, polls suggest. While Vox isn’t expected to come in first or even second, it could be the kingmaker for the center-right Popular Party (PP). If Vox does enter government, it would follow similar political successes of the hard-right in Italy, Finland, Poland and Hungary, and come as archconservatives are gaining major traction in other European countries, including Germany.
“The context of the election is the culture wars,” said Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University. “Spain is polarized.”
The wild cards this year are many. After losses in local elections in May, Spain’s photogenic, socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called an early national vote, putting the election in the midst of a brutal summer heat wave and staging it at a time when Spanish minds tilt more toward vacation than voting. A record number of mail-in ballots could also have unpredictable consequences. Due to vacation season, some polling centers are so short-staffed that the very first in-person voters on Sunday risk being deputized as volunteers.
Most opinion polls suggest a first-place finish for the center-right Popular Party (PP) led by the 61-year-old moderate conservative Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Hailing from the same Spanish region — Galicia — as both Franco and Spain’s last conservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, Feijóo has proudly described himself as “boring” even as he outmaneuvered Sanchez in the debates and led conservatives to the threshold of power. Stoking Spanish nationalism, he has hammered Sanchez’s left-wing alliance for cooperating with regional parties in the Basque country and Catalonia that have agitated for independence.
In the closing days of the race, Feijóo suffered setbacks. Fresh questions have emerged about his three-decade-old relationship with a convicted drug trafficker, a journalist called him out for patently false statements, and his choice of words led to charges of sexism on the campaign trail while back problems forced him to pull out of a last debate.
But he has sought to capitalize on voters who see Sánchez as a grandstanding self-promoter who pushed Spain to adopt laws the right portrays as radically leftist, including a transgender bill that allows people as young as 16 to legally change their gender on national IDs without medical supervision.
“Changing your sex is easier than getting a driver’s license,” Feijóo quipped to the Spanish press last month.
The transgender law has splintered even the left. Feminists in the vein of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who argue that women’s rights are damaged by the assertion that transgender women are real women, have railed against the law for too easily allowing biologically born men to enter female safe spaces. But the law also included other broad protections for the LBGTQ community, including a ban on conversion therapy. It remains unclear whether a repeal of the law would be partial or total.
Silvia María Fernández, an unemployed 56-year-old in Granada, southern Spain, said she voted for the PP despite knowing it may need to govern with Vox.
“I think Spain will do better than it is” with the right, she said. Feijóo “would have no other choice” but to govern with Vox, she added, “and I prefer that to the Socialists.”
Sánchez, a 51-year-old economist, has led the Socialist Party since 2014 and was the first politician in Spain to kick out a sitting prime minister through a no-confidence vote in 2018. He is a survivor even within his own party, but this election amounts to his riskiest gamble. His opponents portray him as a power-obsessed politician ready to do whatever it takes to remain in government, while his supporters at home and abroad see him as a staunch pro-European and influential leader unafraid to push deeply progressive policies.
His Socialists would need to do better than expected to earn enough seats to co-govern with “Sumar” — a 16-party coalition of the left forged in a last-minute agreement under the leadership of Yolanda Díaz, who was vice president and labor minister in Sánchez’s government. “I don’t want to say whether I’m optimistic or not, but I have a good vibe, Sánchez told reporters while voting in Madrid on Sunday.
Some left wing voters were fretting about a possible government with Vox.
“I have always been a leftist but I think that if the right wins, especially if they govern with the far-right Vox — which has many fascist and Trumpist tendencies — there will be a regression,” said Enrique García, 61, in Granada. “I am gay and married, and I think the rights we’ve won in past years are in danger.”
Spain uses a proportional election system to fill its 350-seat lower house, which then elects the country’s prime minister. Parties with the largest vote numbers in smaller jurisdictions are often awarded a lower percentage of parliamentary seats than their percentage of vote — essentially favoring larger parties.
If the PP takes a larger percentage of seats than is predicted, it could try to set up a minority government. Failing that, however, an alliance with the far-right Vox party becomes more probable.
Feijóo had previously pledged to try to avoid a coalition with Vox, but he has grown more pragmatic on a quest to rule. Long considered fringe, Vox denies man-made climate change, has banned the LGBTQ+ flag in one Spanish town where it recently came to power, wants to repeal gender-based violence laws, roll back abortion rights, close the Ministry of Equality and eliminate “ideology” from schools.
Vox was on the threshold of national power despite polls suggesting it might fair slightly worse than its 2019 performance, when it won 15 percent of the vote. That would make any PP-Vox alliance a study in the trade-offs of parliamentary politics, and the opportunities presented to formerly toxic far-right parties as center-right movements accept them as allies. In Finland, the center-right has also gone into coalition with far-right True Finns, suggesting how once-fringe groups are coming in from the political cold.
“Taboos have been overcome because [the far right in Europe has] achieved their objective: normalization,” said Anna López, a Spanish political scientist and far-right expert.
She added, “The main risk of the rise of the extreme right in Europe is that it calls into question the shared values that made the Union possible. Not only the cession of national sovereignty, but also the defense of the rights of minorities, of other cultures and religions that live in the same State, and of different gender identities.”
Javier, a 39-year-old construction worker in Granada who did not give his last name, said he voted for Vox. “I don’t like the way the current government is managing things,” he said. On a day where temperatures were set to rise to 103 degrees, he said he did not consider the party’s stance that climate science is fiction — and how it wants to undo water limit rules in drought-plagued Spain.
“I honestly didn’t think about that,” he said. “And it is true that it’s real, because I am suffering it myself every day at work, with temperature changes that aren’t normal.”
López said PP may seek to check the most extreme impulses of Vox to avoid galvanizing the left. But Vox could still have an influence on education and fiscal policy, something it is already beginning to have in local governments.
Vox and the PP are co-ruling in several Spanish jurisdictions, including the important region of Valencia. But its entry into national government would be profoundly symbolic for Spain as well as Europe, where other right-led countries such as Italy and Poland have sought more aggressive stances against migrants and asylum seekers, and spoken of the need to balance efforts to fight climate change with economic realities.
At home, both Vox and the PP have sought a repeal of Spain’s Memory Law that unequivocally denounced the Franco regime and deployed state funds to help identify legions of still-unidentified victims buried in mass graves. In some local communities, Vox has stood accused of censorship, including defunding a gender-bending play by Virginia Woolf and canceling library subscriptions to Catalan-language magazines.
Some fear its rise to national government could influence cultural expression in Spain.
L’ETNO, the Valencian Museum Of Ethnology, for instance, is showing a stirring exhibition on the Franco years that simulates a mass grave and showcases the outfits of firing-squad victims.
“We need independence,” said Joan Ramon, the museum’s director. “If Vox or any other political party puts problems in the normal development of cultural activities, in any country, you have to start to be worried.”
Rios reported from Granada, Spain.
