Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 3.
Full Transcript Below
The press has a word for Vox and the word is fascist, and once a word like that gets attached it does a great deal of work that actual thinking would otherwise have to do. Diego and I have spent enough time around the people who run this party to know that the word is unequivocally wrong. That is not an ideological defense of everything Vox stands for. It is a precondition for understanding.
The party begins, as most things in Spanish conservatism do, with a wound. Santiago Abascal grew up in the Basque Country when ETA was still killing people for the crime of belonging to a constitutional party, and his father was a local councilman who spent years under active threat of assassination. That formation does not produce a moderate temperament and it was never going to. What it produced was a politician for whom the Spanish nation is not an abstraction available for renegotiation but something his family had paid for in a fairly concrete way. When Catalonia held its illegal referendum in 2017 and the Partido Popular looked too cautious and too frightened to defend the constitutional order, Abascal had already spent a decade concluding that PP’s caution and fright were not accidental. Vox was the result. Everyone said it would go nowhere. Then Andalusia, a socialist stronghold for four decades, handed the right a majority in 2018 on the strength of Vox’s twelve seats, and the predictions have been running behind the facts ever since.
What we try to do in this episode is take the party’s ideas at the level of seriousness they actually operate at, which is higher than the coverage suggests. Jorge Buxadé, the party’s lead figure in Brussels, is a state lawyer and a law professor who has read every treaty he objects to and whose case against EU overreach turns on the subsidiarity doctrine rather than sentiment. The economics bench has included people who understand and practice international arbitration. The transatlantic network built through Foro Madrid and the Disenso foundation connects Madrid to the serious anti-socialist opposition across Latin America, like María Corina Machado and Milei and Kast, not as a vanity project but as the continuation of an Aznarista tradition the PP abandoned when it defunded FAES. On immigration, on the gender violence law, on the industrial consequences of the disastrous European “green” agenda, Vox tends to arrive at the position the PP eventually adopts, about two years early and without the embarrassment of pretending it was always what they believed.
Some criticisms are real though and we do not skip them. It is also, for now, a party organized around one man in a way that raises a question neither Diego nor I can answer cleanly, which is what Vox looks like once Abascal is no longer the face of it. Marine Le Pen was supposed to be the ceiling of her movement and Bardella proved otherwise, so the question is genuinely open. What is not open, or should not be, is whether the party deserves to be understood rather than simply categorized. That is what this episode is for.
Rasheed: Diego, and we are back for another episode in our series on political parties in Spain.
Diego: Are you trying to get me to sing? If you’re trying to get me in a karaoke mood, that is a Julio Iglesias song. That’s what you need to do, Just put that on and I’ll sing. But I was almost weeping the last time we played a song here, so let’s leave music out for a while.
We’re gonna talk about Vox
Rasheed: Yes, we’re gonna talk about Vox. V-O-X. Latin for voice. Latin, not Spanish, which is also a curious touch we will get into, of course.
Diego: We are Mediterranean tribes, after all- ... and we were part of the Roman Empire, Hispania. And, today, I guess, will be a very patriotic topic because regardless of what they speak about, be it housing or economic policy; national priority is always very high on the list of things that Vox advocates.
And for our listeners, Vox is your alternative right party in Spain, your Trumpian right, your non-traditional, non-institutional political movement that has developed itself beyond what we could consider the legacy political traditions of the center right. And today, for reference, it sits in the regional government of different territories in Spain.
It is key to the governance of every single territory where PP, the Popular Party, does not have an absolute majority, which is many areas. And it also holds the key for governance in many municipalities where, again, if PP is not able to get an absolute majority, then Vox will enter coalition agreements, either joining the cabinet or at least supporting it from the local parliament.
But therefore, today’s center right spectrum cannot be understood without considering the smaller partner, which by the way, is not that small because it’s polling rather favorably at around 16% of the vote. Of course, PP will poll roughly twice that number. But in some demographics, for example, amongst young people, Vox is the more popular political movement in the country, and in some regional elections, it’s surpassed and even contested for second place with the Socialist Party. So we’re talking of a relevant political movement which did not have a single seat, a single representative at any political level, European elections, national elections, regional elections, local elections - until 2018, if I’m not mistaken.
But following a sweeping advance of the center right in an Andalusian regional election, Vox became a thing, and it stayed there, and it’s actually grown. So it is a big movement.
Rasheed: So there are a lot of myths and biases about Vox when it comes to international media. Of course, it is the alt-right, far right, deep right.
Diego: Yeah I wanted to keep it as alt-right because I do think the term is more or less justified.
Rasheed: Yeah, but alt-right has a technical terminology if you think about it as literally the alternative right-wing party. But also alt-right is the synonymous term for crazy, far-out racist bigots when it’s used in English.
Diego: Well I wasn’t going for that!
Rasheed: That’s how people use it so you have to be careful and just say, “Yeah, it’s an alt-right party.”
Diego: Well, I’ve been using that for a few episodes now. Glad you told me.
Rasheed: In general public conversation, at least in English, when that term comes up, that’s what people usually mean by that in English.
Diego: There’s so much to learn on this podcast, you know? Like when we use the word technocrat, which is a good thing to be, among elites in the Anglosphere, but here it’s kind of like, not really…
Rasheed: exactly.
Diego: Well-trained but lacking ideas anyway. So what I meant is a new political movement.
It’s not a legacy, center-right group. It definitely has nothing to do with the center. It’s clearly a conservative group. And yes, their partners at the international level are the Donald Trumps, the Marine Le Pens, the Javier Mileis... the Giorgia Melonis of the world. They sit on the Patriots group at the European Parliament, so obviously those are their companies.
Rasheed: But that was also a recent change we will get into.
Diego: But they ultimately, this is a spin-off off of PP, so it should be taken as such.- This is kind of the case with Alternative for Germany, a group of disgruntled people that were disenchanted with the CDU and its junior CSU partner from Bavaria. They just created this new movement, and 10, 15 years later they are a thing in German politics. It’s a similar story here with Vox.
Rasheed: Yeah, similar kind of dynamic, but we’re not saying that Vox is similar structurally to AFD because there are quite a lot of differences in terms of how they see each other. Even when you’re speaking to people from Vox, they always say, “the AFD is a bit too wild for us.” So we will get into why they actually don’t see themselves as a parallel party.
Diego: What we won’t do here is simplify things for the sake of simplifying. We’ll go deep and explain the roots of this party, what it stands for. Surely if you just want to eat the media propaganda, well then, these guys are just racist, homophobic, socialist, crazy far right.
In that case, turn off this podcast, move on to the next one. If you want to know what Vox really stands for, good and bad, because there’ll be criticism here on this episode, stay tuned.
Rasheed: So there are two ways we can start. One way, of course, is to discuss the why. What motivated the leaders to split from PP, especially after the 2017 crisis in Catalonia with the illegal referendum.
But I think it’ll be more useful to think about the leader of Vox and start from there. Santiago Abascal, motivates him? Why did he decide that he needed to leave PP to start Vox? That to me is a good start point.
Diego: So Santiago Abascal was born in the Basque Country. At the time ETA, a socialist separatist terrorist group was very active in the region and across Spain. It’s not active anymore, thank God.
It does have a political arm that is alive today called Bildu, which is a disgrace, and it’s part of the current coalition of alliances that the Spanish government has. But back when ETA was out in the open killing people, they took the lives of 1,000 Spaniards, roughly, and they drove hundreds of thousands of people out of the Basque Country with their continued pressure and boycotts and just violence and intimidation.
There’s films that depict this, some of them available on Netflix about policemen that had to infiltrate ETA and try to get information to destroy their operation. Abascal was born in that environment, and it was a hostile environment.
His dad was a local councilman at a very small town in the Basque Country, so nothing too fancy or big. But he didn’t shit from these assassins. And as a result there were dozens of attempts on his life by ETA, literally dozens. So Abascal was born in that environment, and I guess that shapes who you are forever, because these people are trying to kill your dad, and then they’re trying to kill you for your ideas.
And your ideas, in principle, are safeguarded by the Spanish Constitution, Spanish democracy and Spanish history. No one would dispute that the Basque Country has been an element of the Spanish kingdom for ages. But there you see how politics can affect your life in the most violent ways possible.
And when Abascal was attending university, he had a police escort, so he did not have a normal youth either. He served the Popular Party, which he was a member of from a very young age. Even underage, I think he was already in the youth movement. And it was at that point at which he made a jump to Madrid.
His life had been threatened several times even when he was a low-ranking politician from PP. Everyone knew who he was just because he was one of the heroes of Spanish democracy that were running for office in a place where you could literally get shot around the street for being with PP.
By the way, these guys shot the socialists too, but now apparently the socialists don’t have a problem striking coalition governments with the political heirs of this terrorist group. Not him, for sure. So he came to Madrid and he set up a foundation called Fundación DENAES (La Fundación DENAES, para la defensa de la Nación Española), which I guess is his first project here in Madrid that was done outside of the political party that he belonged to. and his father belonged to the popular party. And it was the foundation to defend the Spanish nation. That was its goal. So in principle, that is not my forte. I guess that’s not what I speak about or what I write about or I research about the most. I’m a unionist so I would never support the separation of Spain.
I could respect people that may have these ideas, but not me. Don’t count me to fragment Spain, which is a cultural historical reality that’s been around for hundreds of years just because some politicians advocate for it. So he set up this foundation, and he created a contest, an award for whoever wrote the best essay on a topic.
And I was nominated. I didn’t win, but I was nominated for one which was based on the 1812 Constitution of Spain, which remains a landmark document for Spanish constitutional history. Many would argue it is the best and most relevant political constitution since the American one.
Rasheed: And you can find it in Congress today, the actual Constitution, the original one alongside the desk that it was signed on. It’s still in Las Cortes Generales in Madrid near the doorway. So you can walk in and realize, “oh, we are here because of this.” And they chose the 1812 Constitution as that particular landmark in political history.
Diego: This is also a very classically liberal constitution.
Rasheed: Surprisingly so. Not surprisingly so for the time, surprisingly so in an objective sense. One of the core points, for example, in the Cádiz Constitution, or also called “La Pepa” in Spain, is the idea that even the people in Latin America should be considered to be Spanish citizens in the empire. This is very interesting when you think about how now, still, Latinos have very fast access to Spanish nationality, much faster than anyone else. They have a two-year period, where a non-Latino or non-person requires 10. That kind of element is still present in Spanish politics.
Diego: For sure, and we’ll speak about that in the context of Vox. As you could probably imagine, with the sort of movements that this party’s involved with, they do have a tough stance on immigration. But they do have a much softer touch when we’re talking about Hispanic immigration.
Now, that has become a bit less pronounced lately but it is also a good sign that this concept of Hispanic cultural, political heritage, historical legacy, is a part of its DNA. So I entered that contest, and that’s how I met Abascal. So I’ve known him for many years now.
And we have a very cordial relationship, and though we may or may not agree on some things, I respect him. So that’s why whenever PP frames them as far-right fascists or whatever, I just roll my eyes, because A -they’re not. B - they’re actually a spinoff of your party and C - they wouldn’t exist if your party had followed up on its political platform promises. Why are you buying the left’s narrative if ultimately you need these guys’ votes to govern? You’re diminishing your own political position by essentially saying these guys are fascists, but then a few days later you’ll take the votes and just remain in power.
Doesn’t that make you a fascist or guilty by association? But that’s how it all started, and I guess my relationship with him has been ongoing there. By the way, I also met Ortega Smith, who’s now been disgraced as their Madrid leader, back then. So many of the people that were involved with Vox have been there for a long time, but he is no longer around.
Rasheed: There are several nuances about Vox that will come up later in conversation. One is how they are framed as a far-right party which is not accurate. The other is how they make a distinction between Latino and non-Latino immigration, especially with regards to North African immigration. They even have these massive conferences and programs in Latin America for Madrid.
Diego: That’s a very important point you make because for the longest time that political, ideological bridge across the Atlantic was kept alive and protected by the FAES Foundation under Aznar. Most of the center-right leaders that you see today in Latin America, I met in person.
Not because I was extremely well-connected, because I was 20, 22 years of age. I was just a kid. But they all came to the FAES events here in Madrid. So María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace prize winner, I interviewed her back in 2013. Guillermo Lasso, president of Ecuador, met him. Macri, president of Argentina, I’ve met him. Iván Duque, Juan Manuel Santos, Álvaro Uribe, presidents of Colombia, met them. That dialogue existed. But FAES became a much smaller think tank when they detached themselves from PP after Aznar sort of distanced himself from Rajoy who pulled the plug on party funding for FAES.
That left a vacuum that was filled once Vox came up the rankings with a program called Foro Madrid that is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone that is to the right of the crazy left that is governing some countries in Latin America (and has destroyed many others) united and coordinated.
So the María Corina Machados of the world, the Javier Mileis of the world, like all of these folks, today are connected through Disenso’s work, and Disenso is the FAES of Vox, it is their think tank.
Rasheed: That’s right. I spoke at Foro Madrid last year in Asunción in Paraguay of all places. I flew to speak at their event. So we’re talking about Vox from personal experiences as well.
Diego: So you’re a far-right guy now. It makes you a fascist, man. Get out of my room!
But seriously, think about who’s sitting next to you. It’s just really respectable people, future presidents of many countries, current MPs from many countries. Fernando Nistal, a friend of ours who is the head of the think tank of one of the largest, if not the largest, private university in Spain. Don’t fall for the “far-right” label. These events are more respectable, moderate, and institutional than much of the Republican Party stuff these days in the USA.
Rasheed: The president of Paraguay opened the conference.
Diego: Completely normal and mainstream.
Rasheed: Mainstream indeed.
Diego: You do have to tell us about how you got into Paraguay at some point, because I know there’s quite the story there. Some strings were pulled there to get you there due to a visa situation.
Rasheed: I can talk about it now and it’s a hilarious story.
Diego: Go ahead.
Rasheed: So I have a Barbadian passport And usually I don’t need a visa to go anywhere, especially in Latin America. So I thought, well, it’s Paraguay, it’s a small country.
Clearly I won’t have to get a visa. So I had my tickets booked and everything. And then when I went to check into my flight the day before, 24 hours before the flight opened, and I’m asked for my visa number. I was like, “Oh, that must be a mistake. Of course, I don’t need a visa for Paraguay. Of all places, Paraguay.” And then I checked and there it was. I needed a visa.
Diego: I can see you looking confused and just saying to yourself “But why?”
Rasheed: That was my exact response. I had to double check and there it was on the immigration website for Paraguay: Barbadian citizens need a visa. Not a digital one either, I needed to go to an embassy and get a bona fide physical document.
Diego: Due to hordes of Barbadians trying to attack Paraguay all at once.
Rasheed: I’m sure there’s no reason at all for this.
Diego: Diplomatic laziness.
Rasheed: Yeah, exactly. That’s all it is. No one goes to Paraguay! But this is a real thing.
Diego: There are all those digital nomads these days that consider Paraguay. But the consensus seems to be, and sorry to any Paraguayans listening, that it’s a bit boring.
Rasheed: It’s very boring. I won’t mince words with that. Oh. It’s a nice lower tax jurisdiction. But my God, it’s very boring. Also Americans have a faster visa process. But for me I would need to do it the old fashion way, in person at an embassy
And that’s just not possible at this point. So I called someone from Vox, who does the organization of the conference in Asuncion, who’s already there, and I told him my predicament. Granted, completely my fault, I understand that, but I have to be there tomorrow. And he went to the mayor of Asunción, who called the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who called the minister of something else, who then called the president of Paraguay, and then it chained all the way back down where they gave me a special invitation letter from the state council.
Diego: And here you are calling them boring. You should be an ambassador to Paraguay!
Rasheed: Hey I’m going back. I am going back soon, next year, to be clear.
So the government sent a letter to the embassy in Madrid, and the embassy in Madrid sent a letter to the airline so that I could get a special visa waiver to access the country in less than 24 hours.
When I arrived at the airport I told the check-in agent, “This might sound crazy, but I don’t need a visa. There should be a letter here for me from the government of Paraguay.” And she goes., “What?” And then she called her manager, and then the manager said, “Oh, you’re Rasheed. Yes, we have a letter from the embassy, a strange order to let you board the plane.”
Diego: You’re the most famous guy in the airport.
Rasheed: Come on. It was truly ridiculous. That,
Diego: That’s superstar treatment, to be honest. Just like that funny story about Ronaldinho, the very famous football player. He entered without a visa and ended up in jail.
Rasheed: In Paraguay?
Diego: Yeah. He was in jail for a few hours. A few phone calls were made and everyone was like “Come on, that’s Ronaldinho, he’s just here to play a game.” And apparently while he was waiting, he was just playing football with the inmates.
Rasheed: Oh, my goodness. When I finally made it to the conference I met the mayor who signed the letter for me and personally thanked hom for intervening.
Diego: I hope your talk was good.
Rasheed: A+ to Paraguay for effort. I’m definitely gonna go back at least once a year. That was fantastic.
Diego: An amazing story that just goes to show the Vox connections across the Hispanic World. Their reach across Latin America is substantial and quite serious. And PP has recently recruited a diplomat who specializes in Latin American affairs to be the head of council for Feijóo’s foreign affairs strategy. And he’s recruited part of the FAES staff because obviously they realize that, well, if you’re not sitting on the table, someone else will take that seat, and Vox has done that very well. And that all stems from a vision of Spain and a romantic view of Spain’s history. It’s like a way to evoke the Spanish Empire.
So if that was worth something to you as a Spaniard, you surely don’t look at Latin American relations with indifference. These guys may be nationalists in many ways, or patriots like they call themselves, but it is not as if they advocate for pulling out of the EU.
They are Euro critical, not Euro skeptic. I wouldn’t label them as that.
Rasheed: The term Euro skeptic to me… What does it mean? I think it’s lazy. I prefer the term “Euro optimist”. In the sense that I, meaning someone from Vox, believe there are so many problems with the European Union but they can be fixed, and they can be improved. That’s why it’s an optimistic story. It’s not a skeptical story.
Diego: They are there. They engage. They get reforms done. We had our podcast about the EU, and I’ve argued then and I will continue to do so whenever I get asked about this: most of the current issues of the EU come from the obsession that the European PP has had with always doing things hand-in-hand with the European Socialist Party.
Rasheed: Correct.
Diego: Now, there was a time for bipartisanship at the beginning of the European project. For God’s sake, Europe killed itself. So the more broader agreements you can get to lay out the foundations, that’s valid. But we’re in 21st century politics. Maybe there’s too much polarization, but the idea of just forcing something that is unnatural, for PP and the Socialist Party in Spain to be fighting all the time yet be the best of friends in Brussels is ridiculous.
Rasheed: And they always pointing it out all the
Diego: And Vox is right. PP has had double-speech on many of these issues because then they’ll go to Brussels, and they’ll allow deals to go through with the support of the socialists.
That’s how the overall view of things was being shaped before the party existed. Then there were some trigger events.
Rasheed: Yeah, but we should say before we leave this point that even one of the main people in Vox that does a lot of the foreign policy, Jorge Martín Frías, is also a former PP person as well.
Diego: I consider him a friend. And I don’t use that word lightly, but I like Jorge a lot, and he’s a nice guy. And he’s an MEP who had been a member of FAES. He had been an advisor to one of the key members of PP in the municipality of Madrid. And he had also launched a think tank, which instead was sort of inside PP in a way called, Floridablanca, where he did great work alongside another current MEP who is linked with PP, Isabel Benjumea. And so Jorge is part of that movement. There are others like Ortega Lara, for example.
He’s a very symbolic member of Vox because he was kidnapped by ETA, the terrorist group, and held in a two-by-two room, if you can even consider it that.
Rasheed: A cell.
Diego: Yes, a cell, with no light and barely any food. He didn’t see light for literally a year and a half to two years. And one of those vivid memories I still have from my childhood in relation to political stuff is when Ortega Lara was released.
I didn’t know who he was or why this mattered. I just remember this guy that looked like someone right out of a survival movie where he’d been on a desert island. He was decrepit, looked absolutely awful, and I just remember his eyes being absolutely lost. So that was a big deal, a huge deal. So no Spaniard that lived through those moments forgets them, and I was just a kid. No one forgets when Miguel Ángel Blanco was killed. He was the leader of PP in San Sebastián, a beautiful city in the north of Spain, in the Basque Country. Great food, great wine, whatever.
But he was the leader of PP. He was going to become the mayor. That would’ve been a turning point for local politics there. And he was shot in his head in a restaurant in the center of the city. I get goosebumps and my hair rises because this is a really serious part of Spanish modern political history. Ortega Lara, the guy that was kidnapped, was a member of Vox. I think he’s member number one officially. So when PP was too weak to defend Spanish unity with the Catalan referendum, people like Abascal a decided to launch their own platform, which from the get-go was called Vox, and still today it’s called Vox. That’s how it was born.
It’s going to be 10 years now, roughly speaking. I think the first time they stood for an election was the 2015 European election.
Rasheed: Correct, and they won nothing.
Diego: They almost won a seat. I say almost because European elections do have a more favorable electoral system since there’s no territorial division of seats.
They’re all allotted nationally. So recently, that party that we’ve mentioned, sometimes called Party’s Over (Se Acabó La Fiesta), got free seats because the electoral system does allow smaller parties to get a little boost on the European elections. But they fell a bit short, and then it looked like it was going nowhere.
And I remember seeing Abascal walk into a room full of people that liked him personally, respected him and then they all shook his hand, and then he left. And I remember all these people sort of elbowing themselves and saying “Yeah, poor guy. He’s going nowhere. He’s done.”
So people thought he was done but he wasn’t. Some people heard of Vox, they didn’t get a seat. Then two years go by, almost three years go by, and boom, there’s a sudden shift that no one saw coming in Andalusian politics. Andalusia being the largest region in terms of population with nine million inhabitants, also in terms of territorial size.
It’s essentially the southern area of Spain run by the crazy and corrupt socialists for 40-plus years. Suddenly, PP alongside Ciudadanos, this centrist party which came up and disappeared in a matter of years, and Vox are able to form a majority. And since then, Vox has been a relevant force in Spanish politics.
Rasheed: It is very surprising that Vox was able to break through in Andalusia of all places. Historically, a socialist stronghold, Andalusia would give Vox 12 seats in 2018
Diego: So if you look at it through the lens of the electoral history of Andalusia, you would have never guessed that Vox would be the key for that region to swing right. You would have guessed that PP at some point could win because of the strong local power they had in the largest cities, Sevilla, Malaga, Cordova, Granada and Cadiz, all very beautiful cities by the way.
But then in the rural areas, they did very poorly. But at the same time, if Vox is a party that is not so much about urban elites, cosmopolitan discourse on politics, globalist, like they call discourse, but rather bottom-up movement sick with top-down policies enacted by bureaucrats that do not take the regular guy into the equation, which all sounds very Trumpian, then it doesn’t become so awkward, right?
Because Trump did win on traditionally Democrat strongholds. When you look at it from that filter, then the Vox success in Andalusia doesn’t seem so awkward. I remember having this talk with my wife and telling her, “When Andalusia swings right, it will stay right forever”, because it doesn’t make sense in what is essentially a socially conservative area with a large rural population as well, plus very corrupt socialist leadership. And I stress the term corrupt in the case of Andalusia. When they are able to overcome the legacy factor that our grandparents voted for the socialists, our parents voted for the socialists, so we’re voting for the socialists, then there’s no going back. So you could argue the Trump coalition has changed some territorial dynamics for the Republicans, mostly for the good because the party now has wider support in some areas. Also for the bad because it’s now become un-votable in some other territories.
But as a net they can contest in areas where the Democrats would traditionally be the only ones talking to regular folks, like the hardworking, working-class heroes. So Vox connected in Andalusia because of that.
Rasheed: And from there, obviously Vox had a very big boom in 2019 nationally also.
But then 2023, they went down a bit in terms of their electoral trajectory. And again, people thought, “Okay, Vox has peaked. The ceiling has been reached. It’s just kinda down from here. They’re gonna disappear like Ciudadanos. PP will again be the singular coherent force in the right or center-right movement.”
But that didn’t happen. Vox is now even stronger than it ever was.
Diego: Yes, and in our PP episode, I kind of argued that if PP in the ‘80s had a ceiling. Certainly Vox in the 2020s has a floor, I would argue roughly 10% of the electorate. These guys are sticking with Vox for a while.
I can’t say in 20, 30 years from now. I can’t predict that, but at their worst, they’ve always polled above 10%.
And that shows you that there’s a lot of disgruntled voters who do not trust PP anymore. And I don’t think they buy everything that Vox stands for, but they don’t trust PP because of the Rajoy years.
And still today with Feijóó it’s just not enough for them. So that loyalty that Vox has created around has stuck. And as we’ll see, there’s been platform changes and adjustments. Some relevant faces have been run out of the party, and they’ve been kind of ruthless managing internal dissent, to be honest. But the fact is that they remain and they’re actually growing and more relevant today than before. So they’ve clearly not followed the same path as Ciudadanos, which was the other center-right group that crept up in 2018, because they faced the separatists very well in Catalonia, so they became a centrist force that people supported in the 2019 election. They went down the toilet just two years later, and they don’t have a single seat anywhere anymore.
But Vox is here to stay for at least for a long time, 100%.
Rasheed: I want to dial into their ideology, because that is the part that people are most confused about or also most ignorant about. Let’s ease into that. We talked about the fact that within PP there are these factions of ideology in PP from the beginning.
That’s how it’s always been. You don’t think of Vox as having factions, but they do, or at least they used to, it depends on how you frame it. And one person that really signifies or symbolizes the more European liberal, freer market business is Iván Espinosa de los Monteros.
Diego: Yes.
Rasheed: He’s a founding member of the party. He was essentially kicked out of the party a year and a half ago.
Diego: So was his wife, who was the leader of Vox in the Madrid region. She performed very well to be honest, because she was running against Ayuso. So she was able to get a very decent number of votes considering she was running against the superstar of center-right politics.
Iván Espinosa is the son of a businessman who at some point had relevant posts in different companies, like an airline or like Inditex, which is the owner of Zara, the fashion brand. And Iván speaks perfect English and French.
You get a marketing team to think of potential candidates that people would love, at least in our realm, he would be that candidate.
Rasheed: Not only WOULD people love, people DO love. This is the tricky part here, because Iván is extremely popular in quote, “our circle of people.”
Even now when he gives talks and so on, the room fills up. It gets a crowd. People, people really are drawn in by Iván. He’s like the star when it comes to Vox in terms of the urban elite.
Diego: Everyone around Abascal was not seen as someone that had a profile that could in a way shadow him. But the party’s development was originally very strong, very positive, but then there was a pivot. Between 2021 and 2023, once the growth trajectory was over and Vox had seemingly peaked and actually started to go down in the polls, they clearly decided to pivot away from becoming a reformed, improved, right-wing version of PP.
“Fresh with no filter. We’ll say and do what PP voters really would like PP to do. You can trust us and you can’t trust them anymore.” And they would talk a lot about economic freedom. That was on the agenda. It was explicitly out there, flat tax proposals etc. But they realized, “our voter base knows we stand for lower taxes and less regulation, but our growth trajectory is going to be determined essentially by the migration debate.”
So they decided to refocus more on the working class areas. They saw how their performance was actually better there. They were getting huge crowds at their rallies. Equivalent to Trump, only that, of course, Trump eventually made it to the presidency. They’ve never won an election per se.
They’re the juniors. They’ve always been the secondary force of the right. It looks like a movement sometimes, not just a party, but a movement, because there are a lot of excited young people showing up at rallies that fill squares of middle cities, the inner cities, and importantly medium-size towns.
Rasheed: But importantly, they’re getting young people deep in Madrid, Montero and the like.
Diego: Yes.
Rasheed: They’re both of them now.
Diego: It’s interesting because it has not eroded PP’s support much but it has eroded the left’s support a lot. So it does seem like they are able to get votes away from the far-left into their voter base.
Rasheed: Which is a very interesting example of the horseshoe theory. I don’t know the term you have in Spain where at some point the far left and the far right eventually meet and become the same thing.
But the problem is they don’t actually say anything similar to what the far left says. So that’s why in this example, I don’t think it’s actually a horseshoe.
Diego: Yes. There’s no ‘eating the rich’ dynamics here. Perhaps the similarity could be anti-free trade, but that is a caricaturization because at the European institutions, they’re not anti-free trade, but rather they want reforms on the free trade, or no more free trade agreements for a while.
Rasheed: They’re very pro-deregulation of most sectors.
Diego: So what is it that resonates with these voters? Well, first of all there is a clash. Although Spain’s been one of the most successful countries in integrating massive migration quickly, some elements of migration have been received more negatively in working-class areas and we’re mostly focusing on the Muslim population living in Spain.
There is a clash there, and only Vox will speak about maybe banning the use of the burka or not letting certain practices be allowed in Spain.
Rasheed: Which is a very popular position of the common person in Spain.
Diego: And so Vox will say these things. And whereas the left in Spain, whether moderate, if there is such a- there no such a thing as a moderate left in Spain these days.
But the socialist and the communist in Spain, they have these “woke” obsessions, and they’ll speak about identity politics all the time. To a regular guy who needs housing and he needs the streets to be clean and safe, perhaps a bit more opportunity and less bad governance,, these guys sound like they could save their neighborhood.
So these guys go on tour around the neighborhoods, and people shake their hands and people are excited when they show up in town. It’s like the circus came to town. It’s like, “Hey, you’re the only ones fighting for us.” Or “You’re the only guys that can save us.”
People in the countryside think this as well. They react very positively to them. And that is why they are gaining ground. So by definition they have eroded PP because if Vox did not exist, one could argue 90% of their votes would be baked into the PP’s polling intentions. But that’s on PP, they lost the votes.
Diego: And recouping them is harder for PP because now these guys can actually go and get votes of younger people that are fed up with socialist government, socialist policies, socialist decay and socialist corruption. Likely they do not feel that PP speaks to them, and they resonate more with Vox.
But sometimes I also challenge them not to become too cartoonish. I’ve even texted some of them about their comments, “Hey couldn’t you say what you just said without swearing?”
You can see how the party becomes a competition internally of who is going to become more relatable to the regular guy.
Who can be Trumpier than Trump?
Abascal is growing a beard and running a motorcycle and going to a bullfight. This doesn’t mean every single guy in Vox needs to behave like that. But they do have this herd behavior to them.
Rasheed: Which is funny because Trump doesn’t actually try to be normal.
He very much likes being a rich guy that does normal things for the media that makes it really clear this is a thing he’s doing for the media.
Diego: Yeah but the point is the truck driver in Michigan loves him.
So these guys are not billionaires, of course. By the way, they’re the best dressed MPs in Congress, male or female.
Rasheed: Especially Ignacio Garriga, who we will get to at some point.
Diego: And then there’s women like Pepa Millan, who is very elegant. But what I mean is that they have well-dressed guys in Congress where today wearing a tie is almost a revolutionary act for some on the left. But on the streets they sometimes dress down so they seem more relatable to folks out there. They’ve connected with young voters this way.
Rasheed: And on the point of whether they overlap with PP or not, we can have a bit of analysis.
We did analysis on the overlap of agreement and disagreement between the last two electoral programs of Vox and PP.
This is from the 2023 election. And very clearly the agreement is very strong on tax cuts, reindustrialization, anti-ocupación and those kinds of topics.
Diego: Tone is very relevant. Because we ran this as an AI analysis. It’s fantastic.
And the tone for PPis described as it really is, which is reformist, managerial, I would argue technocratic, that last word does not have the same connotation in English. So reformist, managerial, institutional andI argue a bit bland and boring at times. Vox sounds combative, sovereigntist, civilizationalist and maybe nationalistic and populist.
Diego: So coming from this, like you say, there’s many areas where there’s strong overlap. Strong overlap, and those other areas where there is much less of an overlap, and I think it makes sense to even go one by one.
Anti-squatters. I know some of our listeners may not understand that this is an issue. But it’s an issue in Spain. People break into your home and then you can’t kick them out. Some people have to hire goons to kick them out of their home.
Rasheed: Goons, like chavs.
Diego: Yeah, the chavs can be hired to show up and just kick them out, because if you go through the legal process, you stand to lose thousands of euros. So it’s easier to just pay the goons directly or wait for two years to get them legally out of your house.
My parents are dealing with this right now in their secondary residence. And I told them, “Go pay the goons.” And they were like, “But that’s not fully legal.” And I go, “Yeah, who cares?” Currently they’re still dealing with it.
It’s been more than two years and I’m like, “Well, told you so.”
Could be chilling at your other home. You paid for it. You work hard. God knows my dad has. He started working when he was 12, built that little home for himself and can’t enjoy it. Why? ‘Cause he didn’t call the goons.
So they both are anti-squatters, pro judicial independence, anti-corruption.
But as we’re recording this, the socialist prime minister between 2004 and 2011, Rodriguez Zapatero, the axis of evil, the worst of the worst, even worse than Sanchez, has been formally charged with very serious criminal charges.
Sanchez is the political son of Zapatero, right? So when we talked about socialist corruption, we did a flash episode on it, there’s just so much of it.
So anti-corruption, pro-judicial independence, pro-family, pro-natality. Do they have a real solution for that? They just throw money at the problem, it won’t fix it. But in principle, they both stand for educational choice and are staunchly anti-terrorist, so in those areas they are fully in agreement.
Diego: So if they have to meet and be real to each other and stop the political calculation and the zero sum of, me winning you and taking votives away from you., These are areas where you need to get an agreement done in two minutes.
Rasheed: So the problem is where they have sharp divergence. Immigration, of course, is the biggest one.
Diego: Yes.
Rasheed: And the immigration divergence is hilarious in some ways because the general Spanish population agrees with Vox when it comes to immigration. And PP, and of course PSOE, Sumar and the left-wing cabal, are against the population when it comes to immigration.
So Vox isn’t in some stark differentiation, some extremely post. They’re saying, “Hey, let me just give what the normal person on the street wants when it comes to immigration.” But PP is saying, “No, we have this grander view of immigration,” and they’re actually not sticking to what people want them to stick to.
Vox’s immigration policy is not some extreme position, I have to make that very clear.
Diego: It’s a law and order position.
Rasheed: Law and order, but also it’s more about cultural integration. It’s anti-multiculturalism. Yes. It’s pro-Catholic conservative,
Diego: And it should be noted that Spain has taken in more than 3 million immigrants in the matter of four or five years. We’re a 50 million-people country, and most of these 3 million people are located in a series of areas. They just don’t go to an empty lot of land. So it does make sense that migration would become a topic.
And I would argue that Spain is a fairly tolerant and open society.
Rasheed: Very open, very tolerant. I would go further than you on that.
Diego: I just don’t want to push it because these days when I see how large of a concern migration is second-guess how open, how tolerant. But on the net, I mean, you’re the immigrant here in the room, right?
So you can attest that, in principle, most Spaniards are welcome to letting people in through an orderly process and letting them do their thing.
Rasheed: It’s a fact of life that when you walk around the streets in Madrid, it is not native-born Spanish people on the street begging for money.
It’s a fact of life.
Diego: Yes, yes.
Rasheed: It’s not some joke.
Diego: Yeah, exactly. So I would argue that we made this analysis based on the 2023 electoral referendum. And I would argue that PP has shifted widely in the last six months on this topic. So does this give them credibility? Not necessarily, because now when they are striking regional government agreements, Vox is always branching out with their key clause: everything we do together needs to respond to the priority of Spanish nationals, so we call this national priority.
Rasheed: To this day I cannot understand why this is controversial.
Diego: PP stutters when it hears this because the left-wing media is saying, “Oh, look, there’s the fascist, there’s the racist bit, and the PP is about to buy it. Look at them buy it right from the racists.”
Rasheed: But it’s nonsensical.
Diego: Exactly.
Diego: PP overreacts when they hear national priority.
Rasheed: But this is why I think people don’t trust PP.
Diego: I agree.
Rasheed: “Oh, well, it should be that the tax money that Spanish people pay for public housing should prioritize Spanish citizens.”
That is the big controversy that makes PP go, “Hold on, I’m not sure about that.”
Diego: No PP voters are against that.
Rasheed: Exactly.
Diego: They made this big shift six months ago, roughly, when they realized that immigration was becoming a big problem and Spaniards were becoming more and more concerned with this.
Rasheed: And, and the fact that it took them this long…
Diego: That speaks volumes. And it harkens back to when I say that Vox may have a ceiling, but they definitely have a floor and I refer to at least that 10%. People have taken notice that shifting the PP machinery takes a lot, and committing PP hardcore real reforms and turnarounds in certain areas of policy has become way more difficult than in the Aznar years or than in the region of Madrid, where Aguirre or Ayuso first have no problem doing radical, good policy. But for PP, they’ve even made this turn against disorder in the migration policy and so on. But then when Vox asks them to put their money where their mouth is and broker an agreement in a region, and they use that national priority clause that needs to be a common thread in everything that the regional governments do, they get labeled as racist by the left wing. And then there goes PP sort of wavering, tippy-toeing around them, saying, “No, sorry not national priority.”
Then ultimately they take their votes and they do enact some of their suggestions. For example, if you pay 50% of your salary in taxes, like the de facto every worker in Spain does (when you factor in direct and indirect taxes and social security), you will want to receive access to healthcare prior to those who may have come illegally or may have come recently and who would at least be expected to contribute.
And the idea that nationals would just be net contributors and foreigners would become net recipients, that is obviously going to not go very well with workers, especially if you have a socialist government which has led to the stagnation of wages in Spain.
In real terms there’s been a decline in wages. You have 3% less pay today than before this government came when you compare equivalent full-time jobs. 3% less money than in 2018. That is a massive decline. We’ve run the numbers at the Instituto Juan de Mariana.
There’s no other country in Europe with numbers like this. They’re horrible. The only people doing well are pensioners, but workers are getting killed by the taxes that fund these ever-growing pensions. And I know this is a topic in other European countries, but at least their salaries are growing less than pensions and pensions will go into a deficit in the future. No, no. Pensions here are in deep deficit now, not 10 years from now or 20. No, they’re in a deep deficit right now. They’ve been in the hole for 15 years, and salaries are decreasing as pensions are increasing. So it gets to a point where young people turn against the system.
They turn to Vox. And with the migration thing and the national priority bit, PP’s is again falling.
Rasheed: It also feels like PP only made this recent pivot because of the recent regularization.
Diego: Let’s be honest here. They did it in the fall of 2025.
Rasheed: I feel it was tentative.
Diego: I think the trigger for them is that suddenly immigration became the biggest concern of Spaniards, along with housing. And there was a big jump after last summer. So coming into the new “season” of politics in the fall when you kind of reshape what you’re going to be talking about, they did reposition themselves.
But surely now Sanchez has called for a broad illegal amnesty for illegal immigrants with no control, no guarantees.
Rasheed: But given the number of people that potentially can regularize after being in Spain illegally for…
Diego: Maybe for months...
Rasheed: So what? Five months?
Diego: And all you need to do is show you have a phone line, no documentation at all
Rasheed: Nothing. No criminal record. Nothing at all.
Diego: I was in a car driving on the southern skirts of Madrid, and I was listening to a district level radio station, and they were playing ads saying, “Are you illegal? Do you need some help with your papers? Come and we’ll fix them for you. You’ll be legal in three months.”
Rasheed: I’ve seen billboards with the same message.
Diego: Well, I can see how that could upset some people.
Rasheed: I’ve seen ads online.
Diego: There’s lines for healthcare services, lines for education.
Rasheed: People say “But Rasheed, you’re an immigrant yadda yadda”. I feel like legal immigrants also are almost more upset than citizens.
Diego: And that’s a very US thing.
Rasheed: Yeah, also true. Because I’m trying to do things in the bureaucracy, and I can’t do shit because it’s completely clogged up by all the illegal immigrants trying to regularize. And I’m paying so much money for this.
Diego: They’re getting the same kingly treatment you got in Paraguay!
Rasheed: So because that happened, I should point out that when Sanchez and Sumar, that cabal, made the regularization plan, which was done by decree, not by a parliamentary ruling, there was a rally. Irene Montero, did a rally where she was saying, “Yes, we need these new people to come to Spain to get the fascists out of the numbers.”
Elon Musk has tweeted about this. The Spanish left-wing is openly saying “We’re losing the next election, but if we give paper to illegals, they’ll be grateful to us and vote for us in the next election.”
Rasheed: It’s a literal replacement theory of the conspiracy far-right being acted out before us with video cameras.
Diego: We have a common friend, Juan Navarrete. He’s the vice director of Juan De Mariana, and we love him. He would tell you “So much for things being conspiracies because sometimes many of them get proven right.” So this big replacement theory sounds outrageous, but I’m watching and following it with my own eyes.
Rasheed: The minister foreign minister and current MEP in European Parliament said, “Hey, we want to replace -”
Diego: And the minister, and her number two. And they’re openly saying that they want to replace locals to get a better result in the election and swing votes back to the left.
Rasheed: It’s completely crazy. Insane, actually. But again this is the current dynamic that we now have in the immigration debates. So it’s not just simply some illegal people coming in. It’s a much more dramatically wide tapestry of conversation now.
And I still think Vox is the only party, maybe ironically even, that has a sane position on immigration. Ayuso in Madrid has a bit more rationality than PP generally on the topic. But at least now PP nationally is coming a bit closer to common sense, I would say.
But Vox was there before, and Vox is still further into the consensus on immigration, than PP.
Diego: I was just cracking up internally when you said common sense. I recall when they (PP politicians) were coming up the ranks, they would be challenged to define themselves politically and were asked, “Are you extreme right?”
And they would always, all of them choreographed, answer, “No, we’re extremely necessary.” They would say that like parrots. Immigration, that is the hot button issue. Whatever we name now is a non-issue in Spanish politics compared to immigration, housing and corruption.
Rasheed: That’s true. But to be clear, immigration is a latent issue in healthcare, in housing, and in education and security.
Diego: Exactly. Spain is one of the safest countries in Europe, but crime rates have increased, and the data would show that roughly 50% of serious crimes are committed by immigrants. So it is a reasonable call to deport illegal or legal aliens that are committing serious crimes.
Rasheed: I would say immigration also underlines another social topic that comes up with the ideology question, which is LGBT issues.. I hate that term, by the way. I don’t like to say that. The term I use is gay rights.
Diego: They just keep adding more letters.
Rasheed: Yes, it’s nonsense. LGBTQIAWHWPQ X, Y, and Z. Who cares? I prefer to say gay rights, but I get into trouble.
In any case, you’re seeing now this shift because of immigration, but especially Muslim immigration to Spain, of many more young gay people shifting to the right.
Because they’re like, “I cannot walk around Barcelona and be harassed for being gay!”
Diego: Well, you know what’s wild to me? This is gonna get me in trouble, but young women in Spain predominantly still are the only socio-demographic group that has not clearly made the right-wing shift.
In other countries, I know there is a gender divide, not necessarily the case in Spain. There is such a thing as a gender divide in that men vote for the right more than women, and women vote for the left more than men in Spain, roughly.
But on comparable terms because in relative terms, because in reality, there’s more right-wing people in Spain, period. But this is fascinating when you consider the broader topic of immigration and especially the dynamics of Muslim migration in some areas where there is a notorious significant rise in sex crimes, offenses, and other violent crimes. This is correlated with migration from three, four countries, predominantly Morocco, but not limited to Morocco. There are four countries that represent a minority of migration but an overwhelming majority of crime.
Data has been shared by the police forces at last. This is the first time it’s been talked about and organized by country of origin.
I know Vox is working on a report about this topic and it will probably come out soon. And from what I’ve heard the numbers are very serious. In the city of Barcelona, 70% of sexual crimes and close to 90% of violent crime around the street and 85% of petty crime is done by foreigners.
Diego: And when you narrow it down, because there’s, like, millions of foreigners in Spain, the fact is that these are a minority and it’s essentially Moroccans and foreigners from the other countries mentioned... The first people who should rally against these minorities are Moroccans themselves.
Because they are going to scapegoat them as a group that’s going to be dealing with the bad actions of bad actors within their group. But the local official communities of Moroccans in Spain denounce racism against them whenever they do these numbers are thrown out.
And it’s not just Moroccans, but it’s predominantly Moroccan crime. It’s what the numbers say. This censor report from the Vox think tank is based on official data. So there will be no debunking that, and that is going to be a conversation changer.
And I know it’s coming out soon because I’m a journalist and they tease when they’re close to publishing things. But when it drops, I’m telling you, it will be straight from Abascal’s mouth, and when he shares these numbers you won’t be able to dispute them because there are numbers directly from the police.
We had our conversation about the media in Spain. There’s an episode we’ve recorded as well about the media landscape on how to understand it. And I singled out the objective as very good investigative reporting. And they were able to access one-day records of detainees.
You’re innocent in legal terms. You’re just detained. It doesn’t mean you’ve committed a crime. But on a regular day, three-quarters were immigrants.
Sure there could be police bias against immigrants and a self-reinforcing cycle as well because if more illegals commit these sorts of crimes, then you’re also more likely to arrest an immigrant and then some innocent people get detained and they shouldn’t. So do not take that word as an absolute. But the size of foreign-born population is 15%, roughly speaking, so if it was homogeneous, we’d be talking percentages around 10, 20%, and we’re talking 60, 50, 70, 80. So that’s very serious.
Rasheed: But as I said, even without thinking about, quote-unquote, “crime” per se, there’s the people on the street begging for money, people sleeping on the street.
These are all foreign people. They’re not Spanish. And even if it was just that, that alone leaves a toll on you when it comes to thinking about the drain they have on society.
Diego: And of course, like, it’d be such a shame to lose our in integration model. Spaniards em- Spaniards migrated because Spain was a poor country for most of the 20th century, to be honest. I’m Gallego of Galician descent, as I’ve mentioned dozens of times on the show. Spaniards in Argentina are sometimes labeled Gallegos because there were so many of them. So Gallego is actually a synonym for Spaniard in Argentina.
By not tackling this head-on as Vox is advocating, Spain may actually find itself in a position it shouldn’t be. Because, for example, take Venezuelans. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of them that have come into Spain. Their labor participation rate is crazy. It’s almost 90%.
You don’t get that anywhere. They’re the most hardworking people ever. These guys have learned the horrors of socialism, and they came here for work. And it’s all over Madrid.
Rasheed: My barber is Venezuelan. I like talking with him ‘cause, you know, usually when you have a conversation about anti-socialist policy, it’s usually in some intellectual group.
But he’s a barber, and he says, “Oh, these damn socialists are always causing problems.”
Diego: They ran them out of their own country, around 8 million of them. The average Venezuelan that stayed has lost, on average, 15 kilograms, so it’s hunger, it’s death. That’s what socialism will do.
We’ll move beyond immigration. Onto another important topic
Rasheed: The gender violence, gender law, gender topics in general are an even bigger source of disagreement between Vox and PP. More so than immigration.
Go figure. It’s almost impossible to understand that. But to highlight how this topic is even more stark now. There was a book recently published by a pretty popular journalist here I mentioned earlier, Juan Soto Ivars. I find him a very interesting journalist. Definitely not a right-wing person by any definition.
Diego: He’s probably what you could call a regular center-left guy.
Rasheed: Yeah, like Ezra Klein in the US.
Diego: There is no place on the Spanish left for a center-left guy anymore. So that’s why you get labeled a fascist.
Rasheed: Yeah. Think of Ezra Klein, but Spain.
Diego: Yeah.
Rasheed: And more literary.
Diego: Yeah.
Rasheed: And he published a book called ‘This Does Not Exist’ but in Spanish. And it went through three editions in three weeks. It’s unreal.
Diego: So what does not exist?
What, what does this topic or book argue? Well, Spain has anti-gender violence laws. Which in principle, one would argue, like how could you be against a gender violence law, right? The problem is the way in which it was drafted was governed by this mentality that we should just always trust any sort of claim of gender violence and take it from there.
But by default, you’re guilty, in this case a man, until proven innocent. There will be a massive display, so policemen will show up at your door. You will be left without legal counsel and questioned by the police for hours. Then whenever you do have the chance to exercise your right, you will still be fighting an uphill battle from there.
So this has become an issue for the following reason. Out of the hundreds of claims of gender violence started by women in Spain, less than 20% of cases make it into court. That is a huge gap. And the fact that there are so many legal asymmetries between men and women in a dynamic that lands 80% of men in preventive jail for something that won’t even go in front of a judge, that is a grave situation.
And no one is disputing that, hey, there is X witness, X medical proof, X evidence, just enough. The slightest chance should be enough to hold that guy and take it from there. Give him his rights, but of course, take what happened very seriously. We’ve just done the complete opposite. There is a slogan among Spanish socialist feminists, that goes, “Always trust what women say.”
But unfortunately, in human affairs, especially in divorce situations, separation or breakups, these claims have become part of legal strategies that give you leverage to negotiate custody, to negotiate assets allocation among former husband and wife and so on.
Some would argue many of these claims are fraudulent, they are not based on enough evidence to even make it to court. They’re just thrown away as soon as they are examined by a judge. And feminists, socialists would argue, “Well, you’re arguing that there are fake allegations going on massively. This is not true. This does not exist.” . Or, “This is just a very small percentage.” When you crunch the numbers, you realize that at the end of the day, one out of every 10 guys that is accused of this is just an asshole who really deserves the harsh treatment that a law like this provides.
But eight to nine of them are either 100% innocent or cannot be proven guilty under a rule of law scenario, so therefore we have to understand that they are innocent. And so the fact that PP is not willing to discuss this law at all has given Vox a lot of disgruntled male voters.
Those voters have had the opportunity to see, well, they’re willing to talk about this. And there’s hundreds of thousands of men who have gone through a bad divorce and a bad separation, and hundreds of thousand men that have faced these claims that were maybe taken back later. But they were used as leverage over these disputes.
Rasheed: It’s one of the surprising topics that have now become the point of a political divide. No one would have seen this coming 5, 10 years ago for sure, but now this is one of those dark things between PP and Vox. It’s shocking how PP really doesn’t do anything about this at all.
Diego: I’ve argued though that the Libertad Digital, Instituto Juan de Mariana, and the other intellectual circles are essentially saying what PP will eventually say in 10, 15 years.
So that drag is a big opportunity for Vox because they pick up on things quicker, and therefore they’re more in tune with the regular voter of the center right, in many of these topics. So with the gender violence law these statistics have been available for a long time.
You can clearly see an overwhelmingly higher number of claims versus the number of proper legal processes that get started, and an even smaller number of people that get condemned as a result of a process like this. We all support the harshest treatment for criminals, but what about that 85% or so of cases that don’t even make it to court? They’re just instrumental in many cases. And by the way, the number of women that report suffering from domestic violence is comparatively low in Spain compared to other European countries-
Rasheed: I would bet, yes ...
Diego: We say things like, “Poverty is lower than it’s ever been.” This is true, but there should never be poverty. There should never be domestic violence either. But you need to look at trends. Spain has way lower domestic violence rates than other European countries, certainly northern European countries that are often seen as more civilized than us savage Mediterraneans.
Also the number of women that unfortunately have been killed by their male partner has remained very stagnant in the last 15, 20 years, in spite of the fact that there’s been literally billions of money poured into propaganda or programs that, to be honest, don’t really tackle the specifics of women who need help. Instead they just brand men as horrible monsters that need to be restrained.
Rasheed: Yes of course, because modern feminism is not about helping people.
Diego: Yeah.
Rasheed: Come on, Diego.
Diego: So you see these very sad stories like “woman was killed today by her partner”. And she had started legal action against him, and had gotten a legal warrant to get this person away from her. And there are some electronic devices that should be attached to both parties, to allow any kind of physical interaction between them, and enact that decision by the judge if he’s preemptively out of jail or whatever.
And women get killed. And it then turns out that this socialist government bought those electronic device systems that did not work on the AliExpress discount shop. This government let a thousand sex offenders either enjoy a reduction of their penalties or just get out of jail completely via poorly designed “feminist laws” to “protect women.”
So considering all of this is true, I now pose a question to young Spanish women: Which way do you wanna go? Who’s protecting you right now?
Rasheed: I think I told you I had a conversation with a friend of my husband. And she said to me, “I voted for PSOE because PSOE is a center party.”
Sometimes you hear some things where you can’t be angry and you can’t laugh. You just have to just stay silent. I could have never thought someone could be that insane about politics.
Diego: I’m hearing Kenny Rogers in my head singing The Gambler. I’ll just keep a straight face. You know, count your money as you’re sitting on the table.
Rasheed: It’s truly bizarre.
Diego: Yeah.
Rasheed: But onto another point of critical divergence between PP and Vox is the EU and the role of the EU in Spain and just in the general concept of the European Union.
I think here is a good point to mention one of the key Vox ideologues, as one would call him Jorge Buxadé.
Diego: He’s an MEP.
Rasheed: He’s from Catalonia. He is also one of the people who is pegged, in the left-wing media, as a really terrible, insane fascist and the perfect Platonic ideal of why Vox is an evil party.
Diego: To be honest, I don’t think he will deny this. If you track his beginnings in politics, he was tied to what could be very easily labeled as more far-right groups. But so was Giorgia Meloni, so people do evolve or change. So I will say that when he gets labeled a Falangista, which is a Spanish term, akin to fascist, I’ve heard him joke about this and introduce himself to a libertarian common friend of both you and I, as, “Great to meet you. I’m Jorge the Falangista.” He’ll joke about it, so he’s aware of that. And yeah, his political youth was spent in some of these circles.
Rasheed: But again, that is not the same interpretation as when you hear the word fascist.
Diego: Yeah like in Germany, for example.
They’re very different terms. I was just clarifying like an honest journalist. You can’t talk about Meloni without understanding her life.
Rasheed: Of course.
Diego: He’s an extremely well-read guy. He’s a state lawyer like the mayor of Madrid who we’ve mentioned, he’s PP, so these are really smart guys.
Rasheed: Top, the cream of the crop in many ways in Spain. Literally are credentialed as the cream of the elite in Spain.
Diego: Qualifying as a technocrat in the good sense.
Rasheed: Yeah, in the proper sense.. In Spain they have these really intense exams you have to pass to be a state lawyer. He is in the top group.
Diego: I must say, there’s too many of them doing policy these days, not because I don’t like them but because we need a balance. So there’s a lot of state attorneys and a lot of public workers.
But we need entrepreneurs, and there’s none. We need investors. There’s none. We need some intellectuals, some disruptors.
Rasheed: That’s not the fault of the state attorneys if the other people don’t join in.
Diego: Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Well I’m not joining. These guys know it. PP knows it.
Rasheed: Buxadé is also a lecturer in law, for example, in a university in Catalonia, one of the best in the country, and he has a blog. But he also he wrote a couple of books recently, actually last year or year before, about certain topics in books.
Diego: Sovereignty.
Rasheed: Sovereignty, globalism.
Diego: Somewhere, anywhere.
Rasheed: The literal dynamic of this podcast.
Diego: I’ve met him. He’s an interesting character. If you just buy the propaganda, it’s very simplistic.
If you meet Buxadé, you may not agree with everything he says. You may disagree with most of what he says, but regardless of your position, he is a very smart guy, and he’s not just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. He knows what he’s saying.
Rasheed: If you read the book Globalismo, the cover looks like propaganda, like Agustin Laje, who is a famous writer also.
Diego: These guys read Ludwig von Mises. And he’s got his comments on Human Action.
Rasheed: But if you read Globalismo, it’s like it has citations of articles in European treaties.His arguments are detailed arguments. Again, you might not have to agree with everything he says, but I think most of what he says is correct. On the margin we have disagreements, but on the core things…
Diego: I don’t think anyone on the left can enter a room and debate him without resorting to name-calling.
Rasheed: Exactly ... to
Diego: be honest.
Rasheed: Impossible. Impossible. He’s too, he’s too concrete. He’s too credible in the arguments.
Diego: And if you’re a libertarian free marketeer and a classical liberal who stands for free trade, he’ll challenge you, ‘cause he knows the dynamics of free trade agreements, and he’ll say, “Yes, but...” And he’ll know very precisely why.
Rasheed: No, but I think this is an important detail where when liberals usually talk about free trade, they don’t talk about free trade agreements. It’s a very important distinction. Exactly. It’s about free trade agreements as they exist in the world.
Diego: So that’s what makes him an interesting character. Yeah ... for sure, and he’s become very relevant. There’s an intellectual that’s a high-ranking MEP in Brussels. His name is Hermann Tertsch. That’s a very German/Austrian name, to be precise. He was the face of the new show of the Madrid TV station for a long time. He was in El País, so he comes from a left-wing newspaper background. He was a war correspondent in the Balkans. So he’s lived 40 lives. There’s room for him in Vox too. They’re an interesting bunch. Yeah ... there, there’s economic spokesperson-
Rasheed: Martin Fritz is also MEP currently. We mentioned him earlier.
Diego: Their economics spokesperson, Figaredo, is also a very qualified lawyer, very familiar with international arbitration which is an area in which I do a lot of consultancy work. So it’s hard for me to come across politicians that fully understand international arbitration, its dynamics, its systems, its enforcement, and litigation. It’s complex. We’ve recorded an episode with Ashley Messick, who is even an expert on the enforcement of international arbitration.
So with Figaredo or with Ruben Manso, who by the way was left out of Vox when Ivan Espinosa was run out, but who was a very eloquent economics guy for Vox for a long time.
We’ve said good things about them and some bad things. These guys don’t like dissent one bit. It’s funny that their foundation is called Disenso. But we’ll get to that. ‘Cause you get kicked out.
Diego: So the only two politicians that I’ve entered a room and fully see them understand international arbitration and get what it is we’re talking about, were the former number two in the economics department of Vox, Ruben Manso, who has since been run out, and Figaredo, who’s on the ground. So they do have qualified people.
Rasheed: They do have very qualified people. So internally this is where Vox also has a very dramatic divergence with PP on the EU topic. Buxadé, who is the main EU guy for Vox, who’s the head of the Vox delegation in the EU Parliament, is a very key feature of this role that Vox plays in the EU.
When you think about how they perceive the EU, this is always framed as them wanting to leave the EU. That’s not what they’re discussing. They’re discussing the original treaties as they were designed, as Spain signed them to join the EU, which should be respected.
Therefore, this kind of overreach, this over-extension, this lack of (in legal terms as Buxadé would use them), this non-adherence to the principle of subsidiarity of the treaties is something we cannot let completely slide over time.
Diego: I agree and I think that if you take a look at where he’s coming from with many of these arguments, he’s very technical too.
Rasheed: But most importantly, he’s right. He is correct.
One of the primary complaints against the EU is that it’s doing too much. Yeah, I agree with all those arguments. It’s doing too much stuff. And on the flip side, as I mention all the time on the podcast, the member states themselves need to actually take on the reins of sovereignty, do the work, and stop outsourcing the blame and scapegoating the EU. So essentially Buxadé is saying, “No, no, these are our problems. We have to solve them with our own solutions.” What is the controversy here? Well, the controversy is that in the PP and the EPP philosophy, they actually don’t have a view of this kind of concept. They think everything can be solved through more integration.
So climate or green policy is another area of disagreement we’ve listed. Because Brussels has led a failed climate agenda, which is industrial suicide..
If that was the aim then you would just draft the European Green New Deal. God knows we’re not a high-growth economy in Europe these days and it hasn’t been the case for a few decades now. We don’t have many fast-growing modern industries, but we do have a car manufacturing industry that serves our own domestic market and is also competitive outside of it. So you would think the last thing you want to do is to punish that industry.
But then again, European elites went ahead with that. Local elites, in this case PPM Socialist Party leaders, just signed off on that. We even set a deadline for combustion engines on cars which were supposed to not be sold anymore in just a few years’ time. In 2030. 2030. Yes that soon, it’s crazy.
Rasheed: They recently rolled that back, I believe. But the fact that it was even there…
Diego: But that minute jobs began being cut. Investments stopped being done. Offshoring began to take place, and many growth projects that could have been developed just went down the toilet.
And regardless of the EU now rolling this back and, parties at the national level reconsidering this no one’s going to pay for this because there’s no skin in the game. But what would be the penalty for Ursula von der Leyen and her team for doing this to the European economy...
10% of Spain’s GDP is linked to car manufacturing. There are entire cities that depend on car making. Vigo, for example, in Galicia. Pamplona in Navarra. There’s areas in Valencia, in Catalonia, Valladolid. These are industrial powerhouses where working class people can still get good salaries and stable jobs in stable industries, and all of this has been destroyed by EU regulatory policy, which PP and PSOE agreed with at the European level and have not questioned at the national level. So Vox has picked that up and workers realize that.
Rasheed: Vox was out against this topic from the beginning in the European Parliament against EPP. They’ve been on that topic. So Buxadé led that charge in the European Parliament, and they’re pushing that stuff also domestically with Santiago and so on here in Spain.
But this divergence is also key. It’s the same idea of the EU role versus non-EU role. But yeah, Vox has been on the common sense vote on this issue again way before PP tried to kind of recalculate and realise “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t get rid of all the combustion engines”
This is EPP, the biggest party in the European Parliament where PP is.
Diego: And it’s killing one of Europe’s largest industries.
Rasheed: It’s killing Spain.
Diego: This brings us to the European Parliament dynamics that Vox has followed since its inception.
So it was not elected for the European Parliament back when it was first founded, as we said. 2015 was when they first ran. But then they eventually get elected in the next election and they have had a good result in the following European election, so there is a large group of Vox MEPs in Brussels.
But originally, they sat with the British Tories and the European Conservative and Reformist Group, which is now essentially led by Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia party. So these were the more moderate elements of the European new alternative right parties or whatever you want to call them.
And I thought that was a very good move, and I thought the European Conservative and Reformist Group better represented what they were trying to signal here at home. Now, since then, Rassemblement National in France, the Marine Le Pen party, which is no longer only led by her and Bardella has become its face. The Orban party, which was a member of the Popular Party, and other elements that sort of sit as well on the alt-right spectrum have created their own political party for the European Parliament, which is known as the Patriots Group. And since then, Vox made the jump away from ECR and into Patriots.
So there is room for consolidation, and these two could become a very large group in the European Parliament if they were to get together. The Polish PiS, P-I-S which was in government for a very long time could very well favor a movement of sorts in this direction, but we’ll see.
Vox did pivot and went from ECR to the Patriots Group
Rasheed: I think it’s also worth noting that Abascal is also the president now of the Patriots EU group. Not in the European Parliament ‘cause he’s not in the European Parliament, but the general European group outside of the literal parliamentary people. Abascal is the official president of that group.
And as we know from speaking to people from Vox and Patriots, we know that one thing they like a lot inside the Patriots group is the fact that Vox has this opening to the Latin American community. It’s a big market that they also can see themselves having more allies with than just Europe itself.
Diego: Giorgia Meloni spent Christmas at Abascal’s home here in Madrid. They’re not members of the same European Parliament group. But that’s clearly telling you something. There’s a lot of synergies between Patriots which has a bit more radical and more populist stance in many areas for sure.
Ultimately, voters for ECR parties and Patriots parties probably overlap in many cases. Maybe with the Patriots member from Poland, it’s not large, but that’s because the ECR member from Poland is the Law and Justice Party, which is the largest party there.
Or maybe the Patriots member from Italy, I don’t know if they have one. Maybe it’s the League, the Northern League. They do have one.
Rasheed: It’s the junior partner of the Meloni coalition.
Diego: Yeah it’s a junior partner, but that’s because the ECR has the larger coalition members.
And then I don’t know if ECR has a French member. I guess if they did, it would be someone like Eric Zemmour or something like this. The Patriots member Bardella, Le Pen, they’re the largest group in France. So consolidation makes sense, if you ask me, and they would be larger than the Socialist Party.
Rasheed: They’ll also be larger than EPP. They’re right now the third-biggest party.
Diego: And they could, they actually lead the charge. That means that they can have a lot of say over negotiations over how to form the commission, and then the commission could be run elsewhere.
We’re not saying that it’s going to happen.
Rasheed: These are big ifs, deep ifs here.
Diego: If all right-wing parties in Europe united, they would be squashed, right?
Rasheed: If they were to come together, that would be the biggest group in the European Parliament. We would have a substantially different European Union outright. But of course insularity and various conflicts prevent that.
Diego: Leave it there for thought, and we’ll see what happens in the future.
It is true, however, that PP lately has been striking agreements in parliament with these two groups.
Rasheed: There have been some regional elections recently in Spain. In particular, we’re gonna focus on Aragon, Extremadura, and then we’re gonna talk about Castilla-La Mancha as a potential option as well.
But yeah, what happened in Extremadura?
Diego: Or Andalusia.
Long story short: PP wins all of these elections that have taken place, and it does not gain an absolute majority in either of them.
PP’s performance, however, was good in Extremadura, got better in Aragon, got better in Castilla y León, and then was worse in Andalusia. So there’s not a very recurrent trend there. Vox did very well in Extremadura, did okay in Aragon, did so-and-so in Castilla y León, and also not a lot of growth in Andalusia.
So the main takeaway here is that these guys hurt each other whenever they start negotiating power. I think it’s hurt- hurting Vox the most, but that’s kind of the bear hug theory, right? When there’s a bigger guy in the room giving you the bear hug it squashes you. So for Vox to turn big words into concrete action is proving tricky, and PP is pushing negotiations to the limit with them.
Should they? From the ideas perspective, people are outraged. Why are PP and Vox making life so hard for each other? Well politics, it’s a zero-sum game. And beyond ideas, these people are trying to salvage their organization, which they want to thrive, at the expense of their rival, which is Vox.
So if you’re just talking about ideas, I think these regional governments could be formed... It’s oversimplifying things in a matter of minutes. But it should take just a couple of long meetings, a couple of afternoons, some beers, some wine or just some food. Just a weekend. Just a nice weekend of five well-chosen guys, maybe one representative from the National Party to be present, and then just four regional leaders meet, fight a little bit, but just let’s get this done.
Leave the weekend with the agreement done. But then the National Party is kidding. So Vox sometimes signals, “Fight this some more. Fight it to the end.” And then it becomes detrimental for Vox. Or maybe PP says, “No, no, don’t give in.” Tease that you’re willing to go for another election if there’s gridlock, and then they lose power.
So these dynamics are hurting the center right a lot because every focus should be on the Socialist Party, its corruption, its horrible economic performance, and how rotten the entire picture of Spanish politics is because of Pedro Sánchez and everything around him. And because of this, daily political gossip is about how PP and Vox, although they win and they should be celebrating, and the socialists are getting their worst results in history in many of these regions, they’re not leveraging all of that because then the bickering begins, the infighting begins and the dynamics between them have become quite toxic.
And Feijóo tried to soften this by sharing an open letter which essentially gives authority to PP leaders at the regional level to say yes to most of Vox’s recurrent demands. I think that was a smart thing by PP.
Rasheed: But Vox had a very negative reaction to that open letter, Abascal in particular.
Diego: Ideas-wise you can, you can say, “But that’s what we’ve been saying from the beginning, but you guys, you’re saying that now, but we don’t trust you’ll do that.” But if you want to save face, if you’re saying, “We want X, Y, and Z, and you’re making this extremely hard ‘cause you won’t give us X, Y, and Z”. PP has noticed that if they give X, Y, and Z, they’ll get criticized from the left for whatever they do, but their voters won’t be opposed to that. Indifferent voters that could swing PP or Vox either way will actually like that PP’s not just posturing as if they were oceans apart from Vox, which they’re not, or voters are not definitely.
And Vox suddenly has fewer areas of difference to pick from. So we were naming some. And immigration, that is no longer such a big divide as it was when the manifestos were done for the past election. The EU politics dynamics and the climate agenda in Europe, that gap has become smaller in the last year.
The Draghi report, the criticism, the new agreements at the European Parliament level, et cetera. Gender violence, that hasn’t changed because, you know, this doesn’t exist. And the territorial model, which is something they don’t agree with because PP believes in a decentralized Spain, while Vox does not believe in it.
Vox does not believe in it, but Vox will never have a majority to change Spain’s territorial status. There’s no way for Spain not to have a decentralized state, period. So Vox has, in general terms, argued against it. In practical terms, it stands for a regional election. If you’re an atheist of this, you would just say, “No, no, we’re not, we’re not partaking in this way.” There was talk at first of Vox not running in regional elections and to just be a national movement, but clearly they did not decide that.
And by the way, Vox has an issue here. Suddenly they’re joining coalition governments, but they have to make hundreds of appointments. And do they have the political, you know community or well-trained talent? I don’t know if they do. They’ll have to find a lot of people who’ve been activists and active in party politics, but does that translate into the ability to manage?
Rasheed: I think surprisingly, we’ve been very positive about Vox this entire episode. But this part of Vox really is a problem. And this is the same problem that most of these new establishment right or center parties across Europe have.
Reform has the same problem right now in the UK. Yes, you sprung up relatively quickly, but you don’t have the institutional infrastructure to support the actual party management. And now you’re in government, who are you gonna appoint?
Diego: Farage was a single issue party, movement, leadership, state of mind for the United Kingdom. It was either in or out of the EU, and that was it. Managing councils and national government, can Reform do that in the UK? Can Vox do that here? Well, they’ve had negative experiences in regional governments, but they’ve also argued that they were not smart at the negotiation table.
So it’s hard because they do think they were not smart the last time. Voters don’t like fighting from PP or from Vox. An overall problem here being I’m not a PP guy, I’m not a Vox guy, I’m just a classical liberal in Spain. I don’t need these two guys fighting every day over the smallest of things while I have the devil governing my country.
So that is an issue. And it’s part of the reason why some people may say that Vox has peaked lately. We’ve heard that before when they had 60 seats in the national parliament. They went down to 45, but now they stand to go up to 70 or 80, so be careful what you say. Also, if young generations support Vox massively, which is what the dynamics show, that means that although some of them may become more of moderates with time. The taboo of voting for Vox is not going to be there. So once you’ve voted Vox, it’s easier for you to vote Vox again throughout your life. Maybe not always, but it’ll remain an option for you.
Rasheed: And also to be fair, Vox in many ways has also become more moderate as a party, especially on social issues, like the LGBT topics, abortion etc. That association they had, being so much against “gay marriage” and these things, it’s not really there anymore. Only far extreme left use that argument. So Vox itself has lost that extreme tinge, and now it’s already seen as a more moderate party.
Diego: And we did touch on the gay marriage debate within PP. It is a non-issue today for PP and Vox. No one’s discussing that. So that’s why things have become more about power dynamics. When things get nasty that means that you’re fighting for power.
So that’s where we’ll leave it for today. I think that’s been a very thorough discussion of the history of Vox. But I think that the one question that I do want to throw out there is that Abascal’s leadership has remained unchallenged. Internal dissent has not been tolerated much, so most critical voices have essentially been shown the door.
What does Vox look like in 10 years? And what does Vox eventually look like without Abascal on top?
Rasheed: While that is a salient question, I’m still unsure what Vox will look like in two years.
Diego: Some people say that Vox is a movement around a leader. And leaders have an expiration date. Also, Abascal doesn’t do a lot of media.
In fact, he doesn’t do a lot of public appearances. He gives his speeches in Congress whenever there’s a session. He chooses very smartly where he goes, and he’s not over-represented in the media. He’s working, but he’s not proactively trying to be everywhere or trying to be sympathetic to everyone.
Rasheed: But I feel that is also true of Feijóo, for example. I feel like in Spain, the leaders are pretty strategic in where they do these kinds of things.
Diego: Feijóo is doing a meeting every day where it’s taking a picture, shaking some hand, kissing some baby.
Rasheed: So is Abascal, just not on TV.
Diego: No, no. Abascal will post a couple of tweets but you could literally go days and days without seeing him in public.
That’s why you don’t watch Spanish TV, which I’ve praised you for. ‘cause there’s nothing valuable really on TV. But if you do, there’s literally many days in which you’ll hear something from Vox but not Abascal.
I’m just saying that some people thought the Le Pen movement in France was a Jean-Marie Le Pen platform. Then his daughter brought it to new heights. She was horrible in many areas, like I disagree with her specifically in economics.
And then Bardella made the party even more popular. So careful with just assuming that yes, personalistic party, yes. They’ve run on the Disenso, yes, I get it. Abascal’s going to be relevant for a long time, and he’s a founder of the party, so why shouldn’t he be? In a way it’s his shop, right? People sometimes feel like Vox will go away like Ciudadanos did.
Well, Vox has been around since 2018, and it’s polling the highest it’s ever since then, so it’s here to stay.
Rasheed: I think a deeper question this is given the dynamic of young people overwhelmingly not only just supporting Vox, but being excited about Vox, and the fact that PP for internal party dynamic reasons isn’t really that enthusiastic to young people and the young will become the senior voters, and also at the same time PP doesn’t seem to have a very particular rudder towards a strong directionality, Could it be that Vox could actually become the senior party In the center-right dynamics in Spain?
Diego: That is a question that Jesus Fernandez Villaverde has thrown out there a lot.
He’s making a lot of projections. I don’t like demographic projections that are too long because they get outrun. Jesus is a brilliant scholar, a professor at the Pennsylvania University, but he’s a Spaniard. He’s warned about how fertility is falling even faster than we thought it would in countries where we didn’t even project it would go down.
Yet at the same time, he’s making these projections of what the Spanish electorate will look like in decades. I see some inconsistency there.
Rasheed: That’s not inconsistent because it is a demographic drift that happens all the time with these current population numbers.
Diego: But just notice how we don’t even know what the demographics look like because 2 million inhabitants could be illegal immigrants who could be brought into the electorate soon.
Rasheed: Let’s say numbers are not going to change at all. Where we are now is fixed.
Diego: You’re asking what is called the Sorpasso question. Sorpasso is an Italian term which means “to surpass”. We always use the Italian term in Spanish.
Will there be a sorpasso? I think it’s very hard for Vox to get a sorpasso because there’s many areas in Spain in which their presence is very marginal, and territorial dynamics matter. I also think that just because the young voters are predominantly right-wing and with Vox, that doesn’t necessarily translate into support for Vox forever.
Rasheed: I also think the lack of institutional sophistication is what will limit Vox in the medium term. Because again, it’s okay to get support for elections but when you have to run, cities and local councils…
Diego: It’s not a rally. You’re not just shouting things to a crowd.
Now you have to manage a budget and make legal decisions. And you need a lot of expertise, and will be doing a lot of crunching. Deregulation, how do you deregulate? There’s no human power that can deregulate Spain. We’ve spoken about how this can be done today through tools and through properly trained AI, but not by the human team of a newborn party that has no political cadres ready to take on this challenge.
So we’ll see where it goes. I’ll leave this as uncertain. I don’t think it’s that much of an easy thing for them.
Rasheed: And of course, we’re assuming PP doesn’t get itself together.
Diego: How do you model who’s going to be the PP leader?
Say there’s a disaster and the left is able to cling to a majority, so that’s bad. But say four years later, now the country’s definitely even more down the toilet, and say, for example, someone like Ayuso is brought as leader by PP like many people have supported. What happens then Vox?
Well she certainly attracts many people that vote for her regionally, but then nationally they do prefer Vox, or locally they do prefer Vox. So what happens? I wouldn’t overthink things.
Rasheed: It’s not overthinking, it’s more like thinking.
Diego: It’s not overthinking. I’m just saying there is too much uncertainty, too many unknown unknowns to go that deep into what could happen in the future, but that is something that I think PP is looking at. And by the way, many of the people surrounding Feijóo are rather young.
So he realizes that.
Rasheed: Okay, Diego we’ve come to the end of our Vox episode. I think the core thing we tried to show is that, though Vox actually has-
Diego: That it’s just a bunch of fascists!
Rasheed: That Vox has a very credible agenda that tracks very closely to the median voter in Spain, and it’s not actually some extreme party. The people in Vox are actually very credible at the top, even though the scandals might not make it seem that way. And there’s a very serious force when it comes to thinking about the center and center-right dynamics in Spain.
Diego: And we’ll be here on the next episode of the Somewhere Anywhere podcast. We’ll keep doing this series on political parties in Spain. And of course now we’ve covered, roughly speaking, the center-right spectrum and what’s next? Well, there’s a lot to talk about on the left wing side of things.
The Socialist Party, the Communist Party and its different incarnations through the years, and we’ll be here to take you all the way and deep dive on all of those topics, and many other issues of the Hispanic sphere and beyond.