Voice of populism shouting loudly in Spain
With its anti-immigration, pro-patriot platform, Vox is hoping for big gains at tomorrow’s election
Until very recently, the small southern Spanish town of El Ejido was known – if it was known at all – for its vegetable production, growing a hefty share of Europe’s peppers, aubergines and courgettes under miles and miles of shimmering polythene. But now, as one newspaper dubbed it ahead of Spain’s general election tomorrow, El Ejido is known as Spain’s “bastion of hate”, where nearly 30 per cent of voters have supported Vox, the surging new populist party of the Spanish Right.
The slurs come as no surprise to Juan José Bonilla, Vox’s lead organiser in El Ejido, who only joined the fledgling party last November after years of voting for the mainstream conservative Popular Party (PP).
As we discuss the fragmentation of the Spanish Right in Vox’s sparsely appointed campaign office, Mr Bonilla grows suddenly animated, seizing a small Spanish flag from his blotter and waving it fiercely across the desk.
“See this? This flag? It is like we are ashamed of it, you cannot hang it outside – it’s looked upon as a disgrace,” he says. “When I wave it they call me a ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’, but at Vox rallies we fly the flag. It is a question of pride.”
And indeed, under its charismatic leader Santiago Abascal, the Vox party – with its slogan “Por España” (For Spain) – has been filling sports stadiums and bullfighting rings with huge crowds waving Spanish flags to rousing patriotic music. It has been an astonishing transformation.
At the last election in 2016, Vox polled just 0.2 per cent of the vote, but it is now on course to win 10 per cent nationally, translating to more than 30 seats in Spain’s 350-seat national parliament.
Just as Ukip and Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party are capturing the disgruntled Tory vote, so Vox is eating its way into the PP’S core support, which as recently as 2017 commanded 36 per cent of the Spanish electorate, compared with just 20 per cent today.
Mr Bonilla gives three reasons for the sudden success of Vox, which was founded five years ago by a breakaway group of disgruntled PP politicians, but only scored its first big electoral win last December in the regional election for Andalusia where El Ejido voted 29.5 per cent for Vox. The first is
the Catalan independence issue, and the failure of Spain’s mainstream parties to clamp down on regional nationalism, the second is identity and immigration and the third (and here Mr Bonilla mimes the palming off of backhanders) “corruption, corruption and corruption”.
In El Ejido, it is immigration that is the overriding local issue. The town’s vegetable production uses large amounts of migrant labour, much of it from illegal migration, which surged to nearly 60,000 in 2018 after Italy shut its ports to migrant rescue ships.
Mr Bonilla supports Vox’s policy of “illegals out”, and as we drive around El Ejido’s migrant district, his distaste is clear as he complains that migrant tenants cause apartment prices to crash as soon as they move in.
Later, when we return, it is clear that Vox’s performance in El Ejido has rattled the migrant community, which can be found sipping Turkish coffee in the Marrakesh restaurant, or queuing in shops offering money transfers and prepaid phone cards.
“Everyone’s frightened of Vox, whether they are Moroccans, Algerians, whichever migrants,” says Mubarak Mounbik, a 46-year-old who supplies the phone shops. “We keep hearing from Spanish people that Vox is going to win and send all the foreigners home.”
It is a sentiment that is widely echoed. But Mr Bonilla, whose father was murdered by a migrant in 2000 – one of a series of crimes that sparked several days of rioting in El Ejido – is unapologetic about what he calls his party’s “common sense” policy. He says: “We want migration, we need migration for labour in this town, but it needs to be controlled and legal.”
Despite the overall increase in migration across the Mediterranean in 2018, polls show the issue in Spain remains a fundamentally local one – a burning problem for El Ejido, but not a consuming national question.
Vox is not a single-issue party though, says Rosa María Escobar, a 39-year-old lawyer with a thriving private practice in El Ejido. She, like Mr Bonilla, has given up on the mainstream conservative PP and is now campaigning for Vox and standing as a local councillor.
More broadly, she argues, Vox is a party of national identity, tapping into a wider discontent about corruption and the perceived failure of the established parties to talk about issues – migration, gender, patriotism – that a liberal media consensus has declared “taboo”.
“If the issue is immigration, we answer with one word, ‘España’,” she says, “If the issue is Catalonia, one word: ‘España.’ The appeal of Vox is very simple. It is the patriotic party. It is for Spain, and for the Spanish. Our roots, our culture.” When Ms Escobar complains vaguely about “no longer being able to openly celebrate Easter”, she is voicing a familiar trope against Islam, secularisation and political correctness that could be heard in any of Europe or America’s alt-right parties.
But in one crucial respect, it seems that Vox is different from most of those parties which – like Ukip or France’s National Rally – have been striking a chord with the traditional working class socialist vote, broadening the appeal of national identity politics.
“If you look at far-right parties in Europe, including the UK, they have attracted working class voters,” says Antonio Barroso of analysis firm Teneo. “Half the French working class votes for Le Pen, but Vox doesn’t seem to have achieved that.”
Put another way, polls suggest Vox is cannibalising the Right’s vote block in Spain, rather than actually reordering the country’s divided politics. At this stage, it looks to be a symptom of further fragmentation rather than a radical shift.
In one of El Ejido’s small tree-lined squares, a gang of municipal workers appears to bear this out, agreeing that they will stick with the traditional Socialist Party, which is still leading the polls ahead of tomorrow’s vote on 36 per cent.
“People vote for Vox because they had a bad time in the [financial] crisis and they believe Vox when they blame it all on migrants taking their jobs. But the real working people, they stay with the Socialists,” says Sebastián Ocaña, 55, who is part of a team fixing flagstones. “Some say they’ll vote Vox and I ask them ‘Why? They’ll take us back to Francoism and they’re against women’s rights.’ And they just say ‘Viva España!’”
The upshot is that even if Vox shocks Spain tomorrow and performs even better than its 10 per cent poll ratings suggest – which is highly possible – it may not be enough to form a government in Madrid.
If Vox only steals votes from PP and the other liberal party on the Right, Ciudadanos, the balance of power may still lie on the Left with the incumbent prime minister and leader of the Socialists, Pedro Sanchez.
But in El Ejido, the expectation is firmly that Vox will deliver an electoral shock tomorrow – emerging from the fringes of the Spanish Right where it has lingered these past five years.
“All the people who voted in December will vote again, and we’ll get more,” says Mr Bonilla, who has detected a change in atmosphere towards the party in the last few months. “It’s not seen as a useless vote any more,” he adds. “The movement is mushrooming.”
‘You cannot hang the Spanish flag outside – it is looked upon as a disgrace. But at Vox rallies we fly the flag’
‘We want migration, we need migration for labour in this town, but it needs to be controlled and legal’