Today, Explained - Let's talk about that party in Spain

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Spain's far-right party just won more than 50 seats in its parliament, reminding some of the country's fascist past. Yes, the party is called "VOX". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spain held elections last week, but unlike most elections, all the attention has been on who came in third. And the name of that third place party? They're called Vox. Oh, like Fox, like F-O-X. No, like V-O-X, like us. We have no affiliation. I think it should be said their colors are like green. Ours are yellow. In fact, when I tell my family members in Spain that I work for Vox, they always like have to take a second until they remember that there's nothing to do with it. Alex Ward co-hosts this Vox's worldly podcast,

but he's also a Spanish citizen. So I asked him to explain why that Vox coming in third was such a big deal. It's a big deal in the grander scheme of European politics because there is a far-right resurgence. We've seen it in France. We've seen it in Germany. We've seen it all over the place. And Spain was supposed to be the one place where there was a vaccination against this populist far-right rise. And the reason was that Spain used to live under a far-right dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. Francisco Franco, the Generalissimo. And so Spain knew better. Spain was supposed to know better.

There are still people. Abuela, my grandma, she's still around. My mom lived under Franco. The memory is still fresh. And so the whole point was, yes, there is a right-leaning party normally, but we'll never go that far right again because it was decades of destitution and danger and oppression and horror. And so why would Spaniards ever again vote for a far right party? And then they did.

And then they did. Spain woke up to the news that no party has gathered enough seats to lead the country outright. The headlines are clear. It's a win, but not enough seats for Pedro Sanchez and his socialist party. The far right are the real victors, doubling the number of seats in parliament. How did this far right Vox party gain ground in Spain? So first is that there has been, as with other far-right parties growing in Europe, there a backlash towards immigration, in part because, and here comes point two, there's been a financial crisis in Spain for quite some time. And so immigrants are scapegoats when the economy is bad.

And also there are people who are just generally angry at the normal political leadership because they have yet to solve the economic problems. And then I would say the third biggest point is that there is a massive separatist issue in Spain. This has been decades long, but it's really grown in recent years as Catalonia, frankly, the economic engine of Spain, where Barcelona is, is trying to become its own independent country. Catalonia leaders insist they will carry out an October 1st referendum, asking voters whether to separate from Spain. Vox has cashed in on an internal crisis.

The Catalonian separatist movement has appalled many Spanish voters. We're fed up that they tell us our national unity can be negotiated or that it can be subjected to a referendum because we know that our national unity is non-negotiable and that it'll be defended with all the consequences. And so with all these kind of crises banding around, here comes Vox saying that we can sort of restore the Spanish unity, we can get you back on your feet, and we will restore sovereignty and borders again. And so they're offering a message that's resonating with a lot of Spaniards, it seems, because these are sort of the main issues that have been bothering citizens for quite some time. So it's worth noting that Spain is a relatively young democracy, right? We've had

Franco from the 30s to the 70s, and it was in the 70s that Spain started to build out a democratic system. And there were two parties that over time entrenched themselves. And there's a socialist party and then there's a conservative party, right? And they've battled back and forth for decades. After the financial crisis of the 2000s and a bunch of other issues, they started to split because those traditional two parties were not solving the problems that everyday Spaniards wanted to be solved, right? Their jobs weren't coming back. The economy was struggling. And so there has been a hollowing out of that center. And now there is a far left party.

And then now we have a far right party as citizens are looking for other answers to their questions. So as this sort of center is hollowed out, when exactly is this Vox party founded? So it's founded in 2013 by, in part, disaffected members of that right-leaning party. That right-leaning party, I should just say, it's called Partido Popular, PP. Got it. So these members believe the PP is not solving the problems of the everyday Spaniards, and part of that is because they're sort of allowing the Catalonian secession movement to continue. They're not fixing the economic issues. They're not being as tough on immigration, and it really came on the scene last year. What is the party's platform?

Vox's slogan is hacer España grande otra vez, which, believe it or not, translates to make Spain great again. Are they trying to align themselves with Trump? I think they're trying to align themselves with the ideology more than the man. Of course, the problem with that is when you harken back to the past in Spain and you're a far right party, people will all of a sudden start to say, that sounds a little fascist-y to me, right? That then all of a sudden you're saying, wait a minute, the past was good, you're far-right. Are you guys Francoists? Are you fascists? They go, no, no, no, we're not that. Like Franco is one thing and we're another. Who is the Franco of the Vox party? His name is Santiago Abascal.

Forward Spaniards, without fear of anything or anyone. For Spain, everything for Spain. Long live Spain. And he is, believe it or not, actually from the Basque region, which is one of the separatist regions. His father was a Basque politician, and there was a terrorist group in Spain known as ETA, E-T-A. And they would fight regular, everyday Spanish politicians because they weren't for the independence of the Basque country. Basque nationalists train near their hideout just over the French border. Their aim is an independent Basque state. So far, they've achieved little of significance, except some heavy jail sentences.

So one can imagine that he's kind of kept this in his mind, that like, Spain is going to be tearing itself apart as long as these separatist regions exist. And he, you know, he carries around a Smith and Wesson with him. Like on him at all times? Yeah, that's at least what he sort of says about himself, that he's got the gun constantly. But you know, he's charismatic as a lot of these people are. He's very media savvy, he goes on TV,

he tries to not sound as extreme as people think he is. Not only have we changed the political landscape in Spain, we have also made a political and cultural change in Spain. We have also made a political and cultural change in Spain. We have opened all the forbidden debates, all the forbidden

political debates in Spain. You know, he's got sort of like this well-manicured beard, and he's stocky, and he doesn't look like the usually coiffed Spanish politicians that have existed for decades, but he kind of has that sort of like manly aura about him that you could, and there's a phrase, of course, machismo, which you've all heard of,

that has come from like Spanish history of like, you've got to be super manly all the time and only that's how people will respect you. Like a gun-toting son of a former politician that was targeted by terrorists who can speak well, like that plays into Spanish politics. Who supports this party and its leader, Santiago Abascal? Shockingly, they're men. Vox's base is about 68% male, which of course means there's 32% women. And a big reason is that Vox opposes this law that gives women a bunch of rights in cases of domestic abuse. And Vox

effectively makes the case that it's discriminatory towards men. And so when you put it all together, when you look at what Vox really stands for, it's one, a massive reassertion of Madrid's power over the country. It's an anti-immigrant stance. It's a return to quote unquote traditional family values. And they've even shown some Euro skepticism. I wonder if the party's support skews younger, though, if it skews to a generation that maybe doesn't remember what life was like under Francisco Franco. So that's part of it, which is why the most votes that the party gets are actually between like 25 and 34 years old. They tend to have 25 and 34, 25 to 34, according to some studies out there. And these are young professionals like these are people with jobs. 25 and 34. 25 to 34, according to some studies out there. And these are young professionals. These are people with jobs. What might they be forgetting? They might be forgetting

that there happened to be a dictatorship in Spain that ruined the lives for millions of people, including my own family. So let me tell you a story about life under Franco. And it's actually a story about my mom. Where's your mom? She's here in America, but she obviously grew up in Spain. Should we just get her to tell it? Sure. My name is Esther Sánchez. I was born in a little town in the area of Extremadura. My maternal grandfather was the mayor of the town, and they were well off. This was during the Spanish Civil War

and he was just taken to jail. They knew for some time where he was. They were able to send him some food and then finally he was able to somehow sneak out a letter telling them, please do not send me more food because the jailers would eat it in front of him and just make fun of him. And then eventually they moved him to a different jail up in the north of Spain

and they killed him. Once they went to the house and captured my grandmother and they shaved her head, which hair is a beautiful element of a woman's beauty. So it's a way to humiliate you. And they gave her some laxatives. So then they tied up her hands and they pulled her all around the town so that everyone would be able to see her without hair. And, of course, you know, she couldn't control her bowel movements. So imagine the embarrassment for my grandmother and for the family. It was all a power trip because the Franco side took control

of my mother's town. So they could do whatever they wanted. They also tried to go to the house to rape my mother and her sisters. But my grandmother was very brave and took a shotgun and stood there on the door and said, whoever gets in here is going to get shot. And I'm saying this because it didn't just happen to my parents, but to a lot of people. Thanks, Esther. Gracias.

No problem. It was my pleasure. A civil war which killed up to half a million people, followed by a 36-year-long dictatorship synonymous with oppression, forced labour and executions, during which, some estimate, another half a million died. At the heart of it, Francisco Franco, El Cordillo. With support from Hitler and Mussolini, Franco led the Nationalists to power in 1939. He argues that the world will be grateful to the Nationalists

for the fight they are making, and he says that the duty of the future in Spain will be work. How did his decades-long tenure come to an end? He died. He died in 1975 to, of course, great fanfare. And that's when the slow process towards democracy began. And one of the main pillars of Spanish democracy is that some of the regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country can be fairly autonomous and that the 17 regions of Spain can have a bit of their own control. And the reason for that was Franco had so much control that one of the sort of compromises was not as much centralization of the state.

How is Franco remembered at this point? There are still Franco supporters out there. In fact, until very recently, Franco was buried in his own celebratory mausoleum of his rule. He was just taken out and moved to another location as part of a long historical struggle in Spain of like how to remember him. On Franco's birthday, Franco supporters will go there and like do the, you know, fascist salute and celebrate him. Anyone who ever thought the fascist element of Spain was gone was always mistaken. The question was, would that sort of ideology rear its ugly head again? It has, and it's gaining strength. And that seems to be the big worry here.

To see a party like Vox rise in Spain is a psychological trauma that I cannot describe. My family is, they're not necessarily worried that a new Franco will come back. I don't think anyone believes that Abascal will be a new Franco, but they are worried that the ideology he espouses, which does have shades of Franco's,

will once again rule the country. We'll figure out how the rise of Vox in Spain figures into the rise of far-right parties all across Europe after the break on Today Explained. This one's for all the millennials out there who get a little okay boomer when they're told, you know, you really got to invest in the stock market. SoFi wants to convince you that the stock market is the place you got to be. It's evidently the first investing platform to offer stocks, automated investing, and cryptocurrency all in one place. And SoFi also has something to entice you called StockBits. So you can buy a bit of stocks that you're into,

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S-O-F-I dot com slash explained. Oh, and I almost forgot. SoFi Lending Corp. CFL number 6054612. Now you know. Shadi, Hamid, you study far-right movements for the Brookings Institution. How does Spain's Vox Party fit into what's going on across Europe? Spanish voters are not in a box. They look to the rest of Europe and they see how other right-wing populist parties

are doing quite well. And that broadens their sense of imagination because you might think, well, oh, a right-wing populist party can't do well in Spain. But then when you look elsewhere, France, Germany, Hungary, whatever it might be, and you see them doing quite well, then it tells you something about the possibilities in your own country.

We've covered Hungary on the show. What's going on in France and Germany? In France, you have what was previously called the National Front. Now they're called the National Rally. They were the runners up to Macron in the recent presidential elections, and Marine Le Pen was the candidate there. And they were able to get 30 plus percent in the polls. And that was a striking result. And it was an improvement over previous electoral contests. What scares people about this party? Well, if you go back, they have a little bit of an anti-Semitic backstory, but they've tried to move away from that. And now they're anti-immigrant and specifically, in some sense, anti-Muslim. And radical Islamists will absolutely not have a voice in my country. And Germany?

The big issue here is a 2015 refugee crisis where around a million refugees entered the country. Germany was really the most extreme example where you have very high numbers of refugees in this particular time period, but you see a significant jump throughout Western Europe. So what does this far-right movement in Germany look like? So it's called the Alternative for Germany or the AFD. Germany is not the only country which has a demographic problem. And we ask all the other countries, you can take one to four million illegal migrants from Africa and try to solve your demographic problems with them. Go for it. We don't want that. We don't think that this is solving our problems. This is causing problems. What they would say is they want Germans to be proud and unapologetic about their German-ness.

And this is a controversial thing in Germany where there's a history of you don't want to be too nationalist because of what happened in World War II and the Holocaust. So there is still that historical memory that makes these conversations very fraught. And now the AFD is coming and saying too many Germans are proud of not being proud and that they want to change that. How much power does the AFD have at this point? The AFD has about 13% in the parliament. So they're not in a position to govern. They're not in power. So we don't actually know what they would do in power. That lends itself to some confusion because people are speculating and say, well, what if they came to power? What would they do? It's legitimate to have that conversation, but it's also something we can't really know until it happens. So I think it's important to keep some of this in perspective. I spoke with Alex Ward in the first half of the show about the younger generation in Spain forgetting the fascism of Franco. Is something similar happening in Germany? Are younger people forgetting about Hitler?

Is that even possible? Yes, I think part of it is that there was a sense in Europe that Europe, especially through the project of the EU, had transcended its past, that Europe had somehow become better. And now these identity issues are returning to the fore. And in some sense, what that means is the traditional left-right economic divide is no longer applicable. That's not what's driving politics in Europe anymore. Now, the number one issues are questions of immigration, culture, identity, and the nation. And I think for a lot of liberal elites in these countries, they were caught off guard. They thought that these parties would remain on the fringe. And that's why initially there was a very dismissive attitude towards these parties and thinking that they wouldn't be able to gain much traction, but ultimately they did. It sounds like this is on the horizon in Western Europe still. The Vox party just came in third.

But if you look outside Europe, say in Brazil, you can sort of see the fruition of these right-leaning ideas, maybe even in the United States. Are there ways to look outside of Europe and sort of apply what the realization of these right-leaning parties or far-right parties might look like? Yeah, and that's an interesting thing. So you mentioned Brazil, the U.S. We could also talk about right-wing Hindu nationalists in India. The right is certainly quite strong now in Israel and has been for some time. So these are very different kinds of countries, but there is a kind of right-wing phenomenon. What that tells us is that even if you have lower levels of immigration or a different set of issues, right-wing politicians are able to draw on a sense of anger and frustration.

And what they're saying basically is that the centrist elites of the past have failed. And also I think social media plays an important role here. There is a kind of thrill in being outraged. To be angry is to be alive in some sense. We feel that we're fighting for something, that we're struggling for something. And I think what right-wing politicians have been able to do, they understand this darker side of the human psyche. The far left can easily do that too, though, right? Is there a reason to be particularly

concerned about far-right populism, but not populism from the far left? All populist parties draw on this dichotomy between us and them. The difference, though, is that the right wing sees us and them in terms of, to a large extent in some cases, between natives and immigrants or insiders and outsiders. What left-wing populists do is a little bit different. The us is the working class, honest people, the people who pretty much aren't corporations or aren't the capitalist elites. Those are because they don't draw on the same racist or ethnic categories of seeing the foreigner or seeing Muslims as problems to be solved. But I think this idea that democratic competition is nice and fluffy and we're all supposed to agree and have consensus is also a bit of a fantasy. Democracy is about groups and parties that disagree profoundly on fundamental issues. But I think one thing we have to learn is that

democracy doesn't always produce the outcomes that you prefer. Sometimes it produces the outcomes that the other side prefers. And at some level, that's something that we have to learn to live with. Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained from Vox. The other Vox. Thank you.