Vox in the Age of COVID-19: The Populist Protest Turn in Spanish Politics

Spain has been among the countries worst hit by COVID-19 and has endured one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. The left-leaning coalition government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was accused of acting tardily; by the time a state of emergency was declared on 14 March, the national health system was close to being overwhelmed. On 8 March, demonstrations took place around Spain for International Women’s Day. Among the attendees were top health-care officials who advise the current administration. It is unlikely that this was a major transmission point. The principal culprit for an exponential rise in transmission cases was over- crowded public transport systems. Nevertheless, in hindsight, allowing the marches to go ahead as planned was clearly a mistake: banners held aloft among the estimated 120,000 protesters in Madrid with slogans including, “I would rather be killed by coronavirus than machismo” and “Patriarchy is the worst virus” now seem naïve at best.

Criticism against the marches and the handling of the pandemic has been led by Vox, a far-right party “with a political ideology firmly grounded in authoritarian conservatism and nationalism.”¹  Under the leadership of Santiago Abascal since 2014, Vox is defined by its opposition to the reputed ills of contemporary Spain: immigration, feminism, regional nationalism, and animal rights. As in many countries, appraisals of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic have been informed by and even determined along partisan lines. This situation is particularly volatile in the context of Spain due to the ongoing legacy of the divisions of the civil war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, alongside the breakdown in consensus politics that characterized the return of democracy.

Commentators have been struck by the ease with which Spaniards accepted draconian measures such as having children—but not dogs— banned from leaving the house during lockdown.² This can be interpreted as evidence of civic solidarity or, less positively, as the legacy of a dictatorial regime. Friends who work for the national television broadcaster tell me that leading Spanish epidemiologists have been happy to say, off the record, that the direct benefits of making the wearing of masks outside a legal obligation are limited, but that a blanket rule of this kind was felt to be easier to implement than public health campaigns. Such decisions went almost completely unchallenged in traditional and social media. Against this backdrop of wide- spread obedience, the aim of this piece is to critically examine what was at stake in the demonstrations on either side of Spain’s state of emergency, which did not end until 21 June, and to locate such events within broader patterns of protest cultures.

A longstanding bipartidism in Spanish politics—the left-of-center Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and right-of-center Partido Popular (PP) alternated in single-party national governments between 1982 and 2019— was overturned in 2011 as the grassroots 15-M movement questioned political elites who had failed to provide effective moral or economic leadership in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The indignados occupied the central Puerta de Sol in Madrid, followed by squares in other major cities. Protests and social media were key to the rise of Podemos, a political start-up with its roots in the Political Sciences department of Madrid’s Complutense University. The nascent party was able to translate the energy and ideas of the 15-M into electoral currency. In the words of Jorge Sola and César Rendueles, “the relevance of Podemos goes beyond the number of votes received…it has introduced new frames, issues and symbols into political life, forcing all political actors to respond, one way or another, to its criticisms and proposals.”³ It can, for example, largely be credited for legitimizing feminism, too often dismissed in the past by Spanish politicians and the mainstream media as a refuge for the embittered and puritanical. Following a merge with the Communist Izquierda Unida/United Left, a new formation, Unidos Podemos, changed its name from the “neutral” male to the feminine form, Unidas Podemos, in April 2019.

Podemos initially seemed to signify a post-crisis turn to the left. Since the transition to democracy following General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, the Spanish electorate has consistently favored centrist candidates. The PP was able to consolidate its 1996 general election win with its first absolute majority in 2000 as a result of a buoyant economy and fears among many floating voters that the PSOE was being radicalized by forging closer ties with Izquierda Unida. In the early, heady days of Podemos, leader Pablo Iglesias spoke of not wanting to remain on the fringes of parliamentary politics in the manner of Izquierda Unida, a pledge that seemed increasingly plausible in the buildup to the 2016 general elections as they came within spitting distance of overtaking the PSOE. Since then, however, a newly diversified electoral landscape alongside the rising wave of pro-secessionist sentiment in Catalonia, culminating in the holding of a non-constitutional independence referendum in October 2017, has provided a gateway for the vertiginous rise of the new Spanish right. Ciudadanos/Citizens claimed to offer a voice to those Catalans not in favor of independence and to provide a rejuvenated 21st-century conservative option for voters indignant at the corruption that has long engulfed the PP. While many international commentators criticized the Spanish government for the use of excessive force in policing the illegal referendum, the perception among many conservative Spanish voters that President Mariano Rajoy was taking an insufficiently hard line catapulted Vox to the forefront of national politics.

Santiago Abascal, a close ally of Esperanza Aguirre, the president of the Madrid Regional Government who had privatized many of the capital’s key public services, was politically stranded following her 2012 resignation on health grounds. Two years later, he formed Vox alongside other party- political refugees, claiming asylum from the PP’s downturn. Promotional videos featured Abascal riding a horse, announcing a new “Reconquest”— referencing the 15th-century defeat of the occupying Moors by the so-called Catholic Monarchs—and making Islamophobia-fueled, Donald Trump–like promises to build walls that would prevent Moroccans from crossing the frontier.

Vox’s initial strongholds were in Almeria and Murcia,  two  regions that, during the industrial development years of late Francoism, exported migrants to the more prosperous Catalonia, and which now have among the highest unemployment rates in Spain. Immigrants provide an easy scape- goat given that so many local businesses keep labor costs down and profits up by employing foreign workers.

Spain comprises compact cities as well as some of the most depopulated rural areas in Europe. Pablo Iglesias has claimed that Madrid is nearer to London both geographically—in terms of time as opposed to kilometers— and culturally than a village in, for example, Zamora—the province of Castile and Leon closest to Portugal.⁴

Regions such as Soria and Teruel claim to have been forgotten by  successive regional and national governments, with low investment in infrastructure creating ghost towns where young people have no choice but to migrate to the cities to find employment.

Transport links are unevenly distributed and politicized in a country where high-speed train lines have been opened amid much fanfare at the same time that many provincial lines were closed. In terms of kilometers, Valencia is an almost identical distance from Barcelona and Madrid, but,  in a calculated decision to undermine the reach of Catalan nationalism, the train to the Spanish capital is almost twice as fast. Within Castile and Leon, the closure of local train stations means that those wanting to travel from Soria to the regional capital of Valladolid effectively have to cover two sides of a triangle by travelling on a coach to Madrid where they can then jump on the high-speed train. While citizens in the capital have the chance to attend corridas and see similar exhibitions and films to their counterparts in London or Paris, the cultural offer in Soria is more homogenous. Television screens in the main square continue to broadcast bullfights to their largely septuagenarian clientele; the town archivist, a keen participant in the popular alcohol-fueled Saint John festivities that lead the bulls for corridas through the streets, thinks nothing of having gollywogs on display in the municipal offices.

From his adopted home in Soria, Fernando Sanchez Dragó—a Madrid-born former member of the then-illegal Spanish Communist Party under Franco and now self-proclaimed anarcho-individualist—champions Vox through an iconoclastic defense of Spanish traditions as a bulwark against the emasculation of present-day cosmopolitanism.

Born in 1976, Abascal is just two years older than the pony-tailed Pablo Iglesias, but self-consciously stylizes himself as a middle-aged man with old-fashioned values and a fondness for being photographed in bullrings, communicating both traditional respectability and a commitment to the epic adventurism of Spain’s “national fiesta.” He is often accompanied on the campaign trail by the cigar-smoking matador, Morante de la Puebla.

Both the PP and the PSOE have traditionally paid lip service to the concerns of rural inhabitants in the build-up to elections but are quick to forget promises to develop transport links or incentivize private investment once the ballot box has been closed. The national electoral system gives greater weight to rural areas in order to ensure adequate political representation across the country, but in a two-party system this was largely ignored due to the conservatism—perceived or real—of the Spanish heartlands. Vox  has been quick to capitalize on this peculiarity, securing support through single-issue libertarian issues such as protecting the rights of hunters and bullfighting as cultural patrimony.

Urban Spaniards were too quick to mock Vox as a kitsch anachronism and a refuge for oddballs nostalgic for Francoism, smugly mocking videos on social media. Laughing at the electoral choices of voters, who in many cases have tired of being ignored or treated with condescension, only fans the populist flames. Spain was for many years an outlier in relation to its European neighbors for not having a party of the Extreme Right. Memories of the dictatorship were assumed to provide herd immunity against intolerance. Belying this assumption, Vox was represented in January 2017, at  a meeting of radical European populists, alongside Marine Le Pen, Frauke Petry and Geert Wilders. In April 2018, leading members of Vox met with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s director of strategy, who classified them alongside the old continent’s new right.⁵ Nevertheless, as Antonio Maestre cautions, Vox cannot “be understood simply by transplanting the traits of the other European national populisms onto the Spanish context.”⁶ Until its use was revived in the early 2000s by the PP government, the presence of the national flag, blighted by Francoist connotations, was fairly understated in Spain. Since 2017, its prominence has risen exponentially, with flags placed on flat balconies representing opposition to Catalan nationalism. Such gestures are grounded in the ostensibly liberal-democratic logic of being tolerant of everything and anything asides from intolerance. In the words of Carlos Conde Solares:

Where other European far-right parties use an ethno-nationalist narrative to paint the EU or other supranational powers as the enemy, Vox attacks the ethno-nationalism within its own nation. It is the Basque and Catalan nationalists who base their ideas on tribal and ethnic exceptionalism.⁷

Vox constitutes a grotesque caricature of the longstanding unwillingness by the centralist Spanish political establishment to recognize plural national identities. In Franco’s final address to the nation before his death, he called on his subjects to preserve the integrity of the nation. A document titled “100 Urgent Measures by Vox for Spain” was disseminated in 2018.⁸ On the very top of this list was, “Suspension of Catalan regional autonomy until such time that the coup orchestrated by the pro-independence lobby has been squashed completely, and those responsible have been held to both civil and penal account.” Punitive party rhetoric attacks intolerance in others, as it claims to represent the freedom and rights of the beleaguered everyday Spanish citizen from radicals seeking to ban bullfighting or feminists on the warpath to destroy the nuclear family and fabricate tales of domestic violence to secure favorable divorce settlements. All gender-based legislation is construed to be based on the bogus premise that women should receive preferential treatment before the law. Phrases such as “Femi-Nazis” are routinely employed to vilify enemies of the state, among whose ranks can be included those who challenge Spain’s arcane legislation on rape.

Advocating a program of national reindustrialization, Vox is nevertheless committed to the euro and the single European market. Its policies are closer to the neoliberal doctrines of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro than to the protectionist measures pledged by Marine Le Pen, and are far more accommodating of the global capitalist order than the anti-system Podemos.⁹ Vox has attracted voters from across the income and educational spectrum, but the preponderance of support from bourgeois voters is another distinguishing feature relative to far-right parties elsewhere in Europe.¹⁰ Vox has widened its electoral demographic, touting a promised return to traditional morality with economic liberalism, which can be interpreted as evidence that it is either more or less dangerous than its European counterparts. In a debate that could be heard in bars and dinner tables around Spain, Ana Iris Simón wondered in a 2019 article for Vice magazine whether, in the unlikely hypothetical scenario of Vox winning an absolute majority, there would be much difference from a government run by the PP, a party whose roots can after all be traced back to reformist sections of the Francoist establishment.¹¹ A key difference between Spain and France or Germany is that the conservative and liberal Right have little or no compunction about sharing power with Vox.

By the time of the November 2019 general elections, Spanish voters had the option of voting for different parties from increasingly polarized Left— PSOE/Podemos—and Right—PP/Vox/Ciudadanos—blocs. The former won by a fairly narrow margin, resulting in Spain’s first post-Franco coalition government. Pedro Sánchez remained as prime minister, but his government would inevitably be pushed further to left-wing policies through the appointment of Pablo Iglesias as one of his four vice presidents. Vox was kept out of power, but by securing over 3.5 million votes, it achieved its best ever result, allowing it to overtake both Podemos and Ciudadanos to become the third largest force in Spanish politics. Key to Vox’s electoral strategy was its ability to use Twitter and WhatsApp to construct its own media environments for voters potentially sympathetic to its articulation of the obstacles preventing Spain from realizing its potential as a great nation.¹²

Of particular importance for the youth vote is that Abascal is the most popular Spanish politician on Instagram.¹³ Vox’s Madrid press office is populated by young hipsters, who do not necessarily share the party’s ideological agenda, but are professionally committed to promoting their employers’ profile. Spain’s established political parties have increasingly been left looking like an uncle dancing at a wedding. As intimated recently in a bizarre, mutually congratulatory Twitter exchange between Miley Cyrus and Pedro Sánchez—about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the need to provide support for marginalized sections of society in times of COVID-19—Spain’s political parties appreciate the importance of new technologies, but social media is not their natural habitat.

Vox first came to national attention through an ability to use new technologies to rally support and galvanize the party faithful in large public events. In the aftermath of the Catalan referendum, the Vistalegre Arena, used by Podemos for its party assemblies and located in the blue-collar Madrid district of Carabanchel, was filled by 9,000 Vox sympathizers waving Spanish flags. After Secretary General Javier Ortega Smith tested positive for COVID-19, the party leadership expressed their regret for holding an event at Vistalegre on 9 March 2020. They nevertheless deflected responsibility by claiming that they did not want to cause unnecessary alarm by canceling the rally at a time when the government was giving the impression that everything was under control by authorizing mass gatherings such as those organized in solidarity with International Women’s Day.¹⁴

Even prior to the onset of the current pandemic, the artillery of new technologies and popular mobilization were employed by post-Franco Spain’s most successful far-right party to undermine a fragile coalition government in the hope of earning a second bite of the cherry. The very tools that enabled creation and consolidation of Podemos were increasingly being turned against them.

In an ostensibly grassroots act of spontaneous indignation, María Luisa Fernández—a self-proclaimed intelligence expert in her fifties—employed social media on 10 May 2020 to call for a peaceful neighborhood protest against the continued lockdown, and demanded Sánchez’s resignation in light of the government’s handling of the crisis. Those gathering on the streets of Madrid’s exclusive Salamanca district draped in Spanish flags to drum casserole dishes were both mocked on social media and replicated, albeit to a much lesser extent, in other exclusive neighborhoods. Ignacio Marimón, recently appointed director of regional news programs for the state broadcaster, lasted six days before tendering his resignation after posting a spoof online video in which he pretended to be one of the posh protesters. The protests were quickly caricatured as the Cayetano Revolution, a name associated with prominent members of the aristocracy and bullfighters. Fernández is an outspoken Vox militant, but she and her followers from the “Salamanca Neighborhood Movement”—later re-baptized as the “Spanish Democratic Resistance” to appear less parochial—claim that their protests transcend party loyalties.¹⁵

It is, however, no surprise that the inhabitants of this prosperous part of the city, which Franco protected from aerial bombing during the civil war, are overwhelmingly positioned on the Right of the political spectrum. In the November 2019 general elections, over 60 percent voted for the PP or Vox with less than 24 percent opting for the PSOE and Podemos. Iglesias’ party received less than one-third of the support given to Abascal’s.¹⁶ Spain has an unusually high number of small- and medium-size businesses in comparison to most European states. This provides one explanation as to why those living in some of the country’s most spacious and luxurious urban flats took to the streets, as opposed to the inhabitants of more deprived neighborhoods, but for many this was not exclusively or even primarily a protest about lockdown measures. The Cayetano Revolution deflected attention away from criticisms of the actions of Madrid’s right-wing regional government. According to the UK Office of National Statistics, the Spanish capital has suffered the highest number of excess deaths related to COVID-19 of any major European city.¹⁷ Madrid’s privileged position as Spain’s transport hub combined with years of privatization has proved to be a lethal cocktail, with health services on the brink of collapse. Among the indefensible actions of Díaz Ayuso, a youthful PP politician born, like Iglesias, in 1978—the year in which the Spanish democratic Constitution promised all citizens equal rights and access to healthcare provision—was  a protocol on 23 March which prohibited state but not private retirement homes from sending residents to Madrid’s hospitals.¹⁸ The civil war was, to no small degree, a class struggle, and the legacy of that struggle continues to underpin Spanish politics.

Vox and the PP alike wasted little time in endorsing the Cayetano Revolution. Abascal’s party seized the moment to move beyond the capital and call for a convoy of car protests, bringing traffic to a standstill on 23 May in many of Spain’s major towns and cities. In Madrid alone, 15,000 pro- testers and 6,000 cars took part. Private car ownership allowed for a degree of social distancing—not always abided by in practice—thereby enabling the participants to claim the moral high ground over the supposedly rabble- rousing agitators behind International Women’s Day or Black Lives Matter. By September, Spain was experiencing Europe’s biggest pandemic second wave, and the Madrid region accounted for one-third of the country’s infections. Within the capital, the southern districts with an average per capita annual income of under EUR 10,000 were disproportionately affected with infection rates going above 1,000 per 100,000 inhabitants. Demonstrations in the Vallecas neighborhood were less peaceful than in Salamanca with riot police using disproportionate force to retain order.

A policy document made available on Vox’s website has proposed to save Spain from the twin evils of a health crisis and an incompetent government through ten measures that include: closing national borders, granting the armed forces greater control, paying the wages of employees, temporarily suspending tax payments, and forcing Brussels to divert money for addressing climate change toward mitigating the effects of the  pandemic.¹⁹

From one point of view, citizens of the democratic state have the right to make their voices heard and to demand accountability of their governments. Conversely, when combined with right-wing media outlets accusing Podemos of orchestrating a Venezuelan-style putsch by pushing through a basic universal income for the duration of the national emergency, Vox’s demonstrations had chilling echoes of the reactionary rationale for Franco’s coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic. The coup had been sold as a pre-emptive defense against the Communist takeover of the state and its institutions.

Opinion polls during the pandemic have consistently predicted that, were general elections to be held tomorrow, the leftist bloc would again emerge victorious but that Vox would gain ground. Abascal and his followers clearly envisaged 23 May as their very own 15-M. These may be copycat tactics, but Vox can make a plausible claim of representing a more horizontal operation than Unidas Podemos—or splinter party Más País—whose voters are disproportionately young, educated, male urban dwellers. Working-class voters are more likely to support Vox than the PP but have not fully transferred loyalties from the PSOE to Unidas Podemos. Against the backdrop of ongoing legal battles concerning bullying, espionage, and corruption, support for Iglesias’s party shrunk to the point of insignificance in the elections for the Galician and Basque regional parliaments in July 2020.

Once the initial lockdown came to an end, Vox faced the challenge of maintaining the momentum of protest. Social  media  outlets  sympathetic to their politics have promoted rallies by COVID-19 deniers. Singer Miguel Bosé, a famous bullfighter’s son whose actress mother’s death in March may have been due to COVID-19, is an exemplar in this regard. Allying himself with such movements would nevertheless tarnish Abascal’s veneer of respect- ability and claims to be the voice of reason. As infection rates began to rise in the second half of July 2020, Vox made public its intention to call a vote of no confidence in the government when  parliament  was to recommence in September. Given that the PP has indicated that it will not support the motion, it will almost inevitably stumble at the first hurdle, but will likely underscore the separation between the radical and the traditional Right.

What remains less clear is who will reap the political rewards of said demarcation at a time when Spain is once again leading European tallies for rates of infection and deaths per capita. The move can alternatively be interpreted as a desperate last-ditch effort by Vox to wrangle electoral advantage from a crisis, or of the logical next step in a campaign to consolidate its position within the new political landscape. COVID-19 has accelerated a dynamic that was taking shape prior to the onset of the pandemic, with Vox professionalizing protest to monopolize the populist turn in Spanish politics.

Notes​​​​

1. Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, “Explaining the End of Spanish Exceptionalism and Electoral Support for Vox,” Research and Politics 6, no. 2 (2019), 2.
2. For example, Giles Tremlett, “Spain Squashed Coronavirus: Will British Tourists Undo All That  Hard Work?” Guardian, 25 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/25/spain-coronavirus-british-tourists-tourism-covid-19.
3. Jorge Sola and César Rendueles, “Podemos, the Upheaval of Spanish Politics and the Challenges of Populism,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 26, no. 1 (2018), 99.
4. Pablo Iglesias and Enric Juliana, Nudo España (Barcelona: Arpa y Alfil Editores, 2018), 49.
5. Carles Ferreira, “Vox Como Representante de la Derecha Radical en España: Un Estudio Sobre su Ideología,” Revista Española de Ciencia Política 51 (2019), 77.
6. Antonio Maestre, “The Worrying Rise of Spain’s Far Right.” Jacobin, 28 April 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/vox-party-far-right-spanish-election.
7. Carlos Conde Solares, “Vox: How to Understand the Peculiarities of Spain’s Hard-Right Movement.” The Conversation, 24 April 2019, https://theconversation.com/vox-how-to-understand-the-peculiarities- of-spains-hard-right-movement-115525.
8. “100 Medidas Urgentes de Vox Para España,” Vox, 6 October 2018, https://www.voxespana.es/ noticias/100-medidas-urgentes-de-vox-para-espana-20181006.
9. See Davide Vampa, “Competing Forms of Populism and Territorial Politics: The Cases of Vox and Podemos in Spain.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28, no. 3 (2020): 304-321, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14782804.2020.1727866.
10. Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, José Rama and Andrés Santana, “The Baskerville’s Dog Suddenly Started Barking: Voting for Vox in the 2019 Spanish General Elections,” Political Research Exchange 2, no. 1 (2020), 2.
11. Ana Iris Simón, “Así Sería España Si Vox Consiguiese Mayoría Absoluta,” Vice, 10 April 2019, https://www.vice.com/es/article/vbwwm4/asi-seria-espana-si-vox-alcanzara-una-mayoria-absoluta.
12. Robert Gould, “Vox España and Alternative für Deutschland: Propagating the Crisis of National Identity,” Genealogy 3, (2019): 1-25.
13. Agnase Sampietro and Sebastián Sánchez-Castillo, “La Promoción de la Imagen Política en Instagram: Un Estudio Del Perfil Personal de Santiago Abascal (Vox) en 2018,” Communication and Society 33, no. 1 (2020), 170.
14. Miguel González, “Vox Confirma que Ortega Smith Tiene Coronavirus y Pide Perdón por su Mitin Del Domingo,” El País, 10 March 2020, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03-10/vox-confirma-que- ortega-smith-tiene-coronavirus-y-piden-perdon-por-su-mitin-del-domingo.html.
15. Ana Iris Simón, “La Revolución de los ‘Cayetanos’: Fotos de las Protestas de Núñez de Balboa,” Vice, 15 March 2020, https://www.vice.com/es/article/n7ww9w/nunez-balboa-manifestaciones-fotos- gobierno-dimision-cayetanos.
16. Margarita Lázaro, “District Cayetano: las Entrañas de la Resistencia Pija,” Huffington Post, 14 May 2020, https://www.huffingtonpost.es/entry/radiografia-barrio-de-salamanca_ es_5ebd2bffc5b60cfcd67f23e9.
17. Elena G. Sevillano, “Madrid, la Gran Ciudad Europea Con el Mayor Exceso de Mortalidad por el Coronavirus,” El País, 31 July 2020, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-07-31/madrid-la-gran-ciudad- europea-con-el-mayor-exceso-de-mortalidad-por-el-coronavirus.html.
18. Fernando Peinado and Juan José Mateo, “Los Mayores Con Seguro Privado sí Fueron Trasladados de Residencias a Hospitales en Madrid,” El País, 11 June 2020, https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-06-10/los-mayores-con-seguro-privado-pudieron-ser-trasladados-de-residencias-a- hospitales-en-madrid.html.
19. “Diez Medidas Urgentes Para Salvaguadar La Salud y la Economia de los Espanoles,” Vox, March 2020, https://www.voxespana.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Programa-Protejamos-Espan%CC%83a- VOX-3.pdf.
20. Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, “Explaining the End of Spanish Exceptionalism and Electoral Support for Vox,” Research and Politics 6, no. 2 (2019), 2.
21. For example, Giles Tremlett, “Spain Squashed Coronavirus: Will British Tourists Undo All That Hard Work?” Guardian, 25 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/25/spain- coronavirus-british-tourists-tourism-covid-19.
22. Jorge Sola and César Rendueles, “Podemos, the Upheaval of Spanish Politics and the Challenges of Populism,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 26, no. 1 (2018), 99.
23. Pablo Iglesias and Enric Juliana, Nudo España (Barcelona: Arpa y Alfil Editores, 2018), 49.
24. Carles Ferreira, “Vox Como Representante de la Derecha Radical en España: Un Estudio Sobre su Ideología,” Revista Española de Ciencia Política 51 (2019), 77.
25. Antonio Maestre, “The Worrying Rise of Spain’s Far Right,” Jacobin, 28 April 2019, https://www. jacobinmag.com/2019/04/vox-party-far-right-spanish-election.
26. Carlos Conde Solares, “Vox: How to Understand the Peculiarities of Spain’s Hard-Right Movement,” Conversation, 24 April 2019, https://theconversation.com/vox-how-to-understand-the- peculiarities-of-spains-hard-right-movement-115525.
27. “100 Medidas Urgentes de Vox Para España,” Vox, 6 October 2018, https://www.voxespana.es/ noticias/100-medidas-urgentes-de-vox-para-espana-20181006.
28. See Davide Vampa, “Competing Forms of Populism and Territorial Politics: The Cases of Vox and Podemos in Spain,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28, no. 3 (2020): 304-321, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14782804.2020.1727866.
29. Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte, José Rama and Andrés Santana, “The Baskerville’s Dog Suddenly Started Barking: Voting for Vox in the 2019 Spanish General Elections,” Political Research Exchange 2, no. 1 (2020), 2.
30. Ana Iris Simón, “Así Sería España Si Vox Consiguiese Mayoría Absoluta,” Vice, 10 April 2019, https://www.vice.com/es/article/vbwwm4/asi-seria-espana-si-vox-alcanzara-una-mayoria-absoluta.
31. Robert Gould, “Vox España and Alternative für Deutschland: Propagating the Crisis of National Identity,” Genealogy 3, (2019): 1-25.
32. Agnase Sampietro and Sebastián Sánchez-Castillo, “La Promoción de la Imagen Política en Instagram: Un Estudio Del Perfil Personal de Santiago Abascal (Vox) en 2018,” Communication and Society 33, no. 1 (2020), 170.
33. Miguel González, “Vox Confirma que Ortega Smith Tiene Coronavirus y Pide Perdón por su Mitin Del Domingo,” El País, 10 March 2020, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03-10/vox-confirma-que- ortega-smith-tiene-coronavirus-y-piden-perdon-por-su-mitin-del-domingo.html.
34. Ana Iris Simón, “La Revolución de los ‘Cayetanos’: Fotos de las Protestas de Núñez de Balboa,” Vice, 15 March 2020, https://www.vice.com/es/article/n7ww9w/nunez-balboa-manifestaciones-fotos- gobierno-dimision-cayetanos.
35. Margarita Lázaro, “District Cayetano: las Entrañas de la Resistencia Pija,” Huffington Post, 14 May 2020, https://www.huffingtonpost.es/entry/radiografia-barrio-de-salamanca_ es_5ebd2bffc5b60cfcd67f23e9.
36. Elena G. Sevillano, “Madrid, la Gran Ciudad Europea Con el Mayor Exceso de Mortalidad por el Coronavirus,” El País, 31 July 2020, https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-07-31/madrid-la-gran-ciudad- europea-con-el-mayor-exceso-de-mortalidad-por-el-coronavirus.html.
37. Fernando Peinado and Juan José Mateo, “Los Mayores Con Seguro Privado sí Fueron Trasladados de Residencias a Hospitales en Madrid,” El País, 11 June 2020, https://elpais.com/espana/ madrid/2020-06-10/los-mayores-con-seguro-privado-pudieron-ser-trasladados-de-residencias-a- hospitales-en-madrid.html.
38. “Diez Medidas Urgentes Para Salvaguadar La Salud y la Economia de los Espanoles,” Vox, March 2020, https://www.voxespana.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Programa-Protejamos-Espan%CC%83a- VOX-3.pdf.

This Argument appears in Politics of Protest, the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of the Journal of International Affairs. Subscribe or purchase to read the article in print or via JSTOR.

Photo Credit: Contando Estrelas, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license