About 10 months ago, a smiling Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, proudly described the northern region of Castilla y León as a model of what lay ahead for the party.
The sparsely populated region, where the far right had made its first foray into a Spanish regional government since the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, was a “showroom” for the party’s promises to do away with Spanish laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality and violence against women.
Castilla y León, Abascal added in the interview with Spanish radio, was “an example of the alternative Spain needs”.
His words may have proved prescient, but not in the way he intended: Sunday’s snap general election saw Vox lose five of the six seats it won in Castilla y León in the 2019 vote.
This downward trend played out across Spain, as Vox saw its vote count drop from the 15% it received in 2019 to 12%. The loss – amounting to about 623,000 votes – sent the party’s representation in the country’s parliament plummeting from 52 to 33 seats.
Polls had predicted that the seat count of the far-right party would drop in Sunday’s general election. But the loss was widely expected to be compensated for by the party’s emergence as the election’s kingmaker, potentially paving the way for a coalition government – led by the conservative People’s party (PP) – which would have included the far right for the first time since Spain returned to democracy after Franco’s death five decades ago.
Instead the combined result between the PP and Vox came to 169 seats, falling short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat parliament. While a potential PP-Vox coalition may be able to garner one or two votes from smaller parties, the bulk of these will be unlikely to agree to any deal that could ease Vox’s path to power.
Sunday’s result suggested that Vox’s hardline attitudes, epitomised by a massive banner erected in central Madrid that showed a hand tossing symbols representing feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, Catalan independence, climate crisis action and communism into a bin, appeared to have turned off voters.
The party’s recent foray into regional and municipal power across the country, where it racked up headlines over the cancellation of a movie screening due to a kiss between two women, an attempted crackdown on access to abortion, and its vetoing of a theatrical adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s gender-shifting novel Orlando, may have also proved unpalatable to some.
The disappearance of the conservative Ciudadanos party – whose vote is believed to have gone primarily to the PP – meant Vox’s seat count may have also been slightly penalised by an electoral system weighted in favour of larger parties.
While Vox remains the third most voted-for party nationally, the results relegate it to political near-irrelevance in the country’s parliament. The party failed to meet the parliamentary threshold to present no-confidence motions and legally challenge the constitutionality of legislative measures.
Even so, Abascal avoided any sort of reflection on his party’s performance on Sunday. Instead, he lashed out at the Socialist leader, Pedro Sánchez. “I would like to point out something that is bad news for many Spaniards,” Abascal told supporters. “Despite losing the election, Pedro Sánchez can block the formation of a new government. Worst still, Pedro Sánchez could even be invested as prime minister with the help of communists, separatists and terrorists.”
Spain’s snap election had taken on a wider significance across Europe as analysts painted it as a barometer of Europeans’ shifting attitude towards the far right. It was a point driven home by Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, during a video link appearance at a Vox rally in Valencia earlier this month.
Pointing to governments in Italy, Finland, Sweden, Poland and the Czech Republic, Meloni argued that the time had come for “patriots”. She added: “For all of us it is crucial that on 23 July a conservative patriotic alternative is established, in which Vox plays a leading and decisive role in the formation of the new national government.”
But it appears Spain bucked the tide, pointed out Jordi Évole, one of Spain’s best-known television personalities on the left. “The extreme right, which is in its best moment across much of Europe, is losing votes and seats in Spain,” he wrote on Twitter. “Today, more than ever, VIVA ESPAÑA.”
