How the Upcoming Rise of the Far-Right in Spain Will Affect the Political Scene

Spain is preparing to hold snap general elections next July, instead of at the end of the year, after the defeat of the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), the current ruling coalition’s leader, in the local and regional elections held on May 28, 2023, and the sweep of conservatives and the far-right in its councils.

The sudden political maneuver has pushed the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy into a crisis of alliances on both sides of the political spectrum, just as Spain prepares to assume the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.

This gives these elections great importance on various levels, as the rise of the far-right constitutes confusion for the Spanish political scene and is considered an expansion of the movement’s margin in front of the formations of this right in Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, France, Sweden, and others, and the rise of nationalist and populist rhetoric that feed on hatred of immigrants and foreigners.

Spanish voters will vote next month to elect their 350 representatives in the House of Representatives, in addition to 208 out of 265 seats in the Senate.

According to polls of voting intentions, the country is divided between two roughly equal blocs of supporters of the left and supporters of the right, which makes the chances of reaching power closely related to political skill and engineering alliances, which Sanchez remains, despite everything, perhaps the most capable of doing during the next weeks.

 

Snap Elections

In what was described by observers as an ultra-literal tactic, the Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez announced on May 29, 2023, the dissolution of Parliament, calling for snap elections to be held on July 23, 2023, in light of the important gains achieved by the conservatives and the far-right in the regional and local elections at the expense of the parties of the ruling leftist coalition since 2019.

Sanchez also bore personal responsibility for the poor performance of the ruling coalition, made up of Socialists, Podemos, and Independents, in the local elections, which ended up leading the People’s Party (PP) in most of the country’s major cities, such as Madrid, Seville, Valencia, and Malaga.

The surprise announcement followed a campaign led by the PP to denounce the political and moral positions of Sanchez, who has become a source of deep polarization at home and is portrayed by the opposition party’s president, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, as an unscrupulous and untrustworthy Machiavellian.

According to AFP, Spain’s local elections results showed a growing rise for the right-wing camp, with the PP obtaining the majority in the municipalities and regions in which the elections took place.

The PP won 31.5% of the vote in the local elections, a nine percentage point surge from its showing in the 2019 elections, while the Socialist’s 28.1% marked a drop of one percentage point.

However, the remarkable progress was for the far-right Vox party, which received 7.2% of the voting intentions, ahead of the 2019 election by 3.5%.

The elections included all 8,131 municipalities in Spain, with 35.5 million voters, and local governments in 12 out of 17 Spanish autonomous regions, including about 18.3 million voters.

Spain’s regional governments have wide powers and budgetary discretion in matters of education, health, housing, and the police.

 

political Imbalances

The results of the recent elections in Spain are considered a dangerous bell that may return the country to a political stage that recalls the era of dictator Franco and the civil war.

While the traditional political class considered that this right rise brought Spain back to the political imbalances that shook the political and social balances against democracy during the end of the seventies.

“The Vox party is open to forming national and regional governing coalitions with the mainstream conservative PP,” said Vox leader Santiago Abascal on May 29 after right-wing parties won a regional election.

The far-right in Spain had succeeded in exploiting the economic crisis that was exacerbated by the pandemic, the high inflation rate, the repercussions of the Russian–Ukrainian war, and the deterioration of the living conditions of some segments of the middle class.

The right, through social media, contributed to fueling societal and political polarization, which opened the way for it to expand its social base.

In an address to Socialist lawmakers on May 31, 2023, Sanchez said there is no difference between the PP and Vox. He warned they would dismantle the social progress made since he took office in 2018, according to the Spanish newspaper The Local.

Among the reforms at risk if the right wins the July 23 election is a sharp rise in the minimum wage, extra funding for scholarships, and a climate change law, he said.

“We have to clarify if Spaniards want to continue with policies that expand rights or if they want to repeal those rights,” Sanchez added.

According to The Guardian, Sanchez’s move would inevitably be his most daring gamble to date in a high-stakes career.

Although the time is not appropriate in terms of Spain assuming the last rotating presidency of the EU before the European Parliament elections next year, it is in Sanchez’s personal interest to advance the date of the legislative elections, which may give him better chances of arranging the affairs of the Spanish left, in parallel with implicating its rival, the PP, in a possible alliance with the far-right Vox.

The conservative PP, the second-largest party in the national Parliament behind the PSOE, is now in a position to govern alone in two regions and with the far-right Vox as a junior partner in six others.

PM Sanchez suffers from a severe division within his party, so calling snap elections in less than two months will force the Socialist to resolve the debate or risk fading from the corridors of Spanish political decision-making in favor of the right.

This was indicated by Mr. Okba Mohammad, a Syrian journalist residing in Spain, in his interview with Al-Estiklal, stating that “Sanchez’s decision to call for snap elections put the left under pressure to unite behind him or face disaster.”

“Sanchez’s decision also pushed the right into a critical corner, given that he did not achieve an absolute majority in the regional legislatures outside the capital, which will make it compelled, if it wants to take power, to build an electoral alliance and a parliamentary coalition with the far-right,” he said.

Mr. Mohammad noted that “if the PP allies with the Vox in order to manage the rule of some cities, this will make the far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-EU party a real actor in the next government.”

“Without a doubt, the PSOE will use the right-wing coalition, if it happens, as a specter to intimidate centrist voters and attract them to the left,” he added.

 

Far-Right Movement

In another context, an anti-Muslim movement is currently active in Spain that calls itself La Reconquista, meaning recovery, likening itself to the Christian kingdoms that recovered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims six centuries ago.

In the past few years, the phenomenon of far-right attempts to exploit social media has emerged in Spain to spread poisonous anti-democratic ideas, stir up sectarian strife and incite hatred of Muslims.

According to an Associated Press report on May 5, 2023, these far-rights are trying through fake accounts, often on Twitter, to stir up anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic sentiments and undermine faith in Spanish democracy that embraces pluralistic values.

They rely on the same playbook as right-wing extremists in the United States, Brazil, and other countries who use social media to expand their activities, extend their influence and recruit new followers.

In some cases, these far-right nationalists are taking advantage of Twitter’s loose posting rules to promote hate speech and threats of violence, while in others, they pretend to be Muslim as a way to discredit actual Muslims.

The followers of the far-right Spanish movement consider their struggle against the Muslims to be a divine continuation of a bloody conflict that lasted for centuries, specifically in the Middle Ages when the Iberian Peninsula was under Islamic rule.

The remarkable overlap of tactics and interests isn’t a coincidence, but reflects how far-right groups in many countries are learning from one another, copying each other’s successes, said Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the American Network Contagion Research Institute.

The far-right party Vox helped popularize Reconquista online, using the term repeatedly in Tweets ahead of the 2019 election.

The party’s Twitter account was briefly suspended in 2020 for accusing its critics of promoting pedophilia and again in 2021 for inciting hatred against Muslims.

Far-right groups in several countries have sought to reshape the public understanding of events like the holocaust, slavery and, more recently, the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“By ignoring the details of the historic Reconquista or Franco’s dictatorship, La Reconquista seeks to legitimize its own anti-immigrant views as traditional Spanish values,” according to Marc Esteve Del Valle, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who has studied Reconquista’s use of the Internet.