The irresponsibility of feeding the ghost of fraud

BarcelonaThe first rule of authoritarian leaders is to delegitimize institutions and never recognize an electoral defeat. We are seeing this in the United States with Donald Trump, who six years later still has not recognized Joe Biden's victory in 2020. In Spain, it is Vox who applies the trumpism instruction manual to the letter, and it has been weeks since Santiago Abascal and his followers have been propagating on social media and through every means possible the idea that Pedro Sánchez's government is preparing a rigged election for the elections scheduled for next year. This breeding ground is fueled by fake news about Indra's power, about the manipulation of mail-in voting, or about the effects that the regularization of immigrants will have on the census, which is nil. The objective, however, is to create an unbreathable climate, close to insurrection, and to prepare the ground to challenge the results if they do not match their expectations. The risk, however, of provoking a social explosion with violence is very high, as already happened on January 6, 2021, in the Capitol or also in Brasília on January 8, 2023.

That is why it is particularly disturbing that the PP, through Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has joined this irresponsible campaign. Do they really want to sell the image to the world that Spain is not a democracy and that election results can be easily tampered with? Only the PP's complexes regarding Vox explain this shameful following of the far-right. But what's more, how can the PSOE be accused of preparing a rigged election when election after election the socialists are losing ground in all territories? Or is it that the counting system is different in regional or municipal elections than in general elections? Or is it that the PP and also Vox do not have access to all electoral records through their poll watchers?

But as we were saying, the strategy goes beyond an electoral count. It's about eroding trust in institutions, destroying the notion of truth, and establishing a new paradigm where these new populist leaders have no checks and balances, and political adversaries, a figure now embodied by Pedro Sánchez, are in jail. It's understandable that Vox wants to play this card because this party has never believed in democracy and longs for Francoism, but the PP is something else. The PP is a party that, despite having an ex-minister of Franco as its founder, theoretically forms part of the so-called "constitutional bloc" and has governed in two democratic periods (1996-2004 and 2011-2018). Despite this, in the past it has already flirted with this idea. For instance, its candidate, María Guardiola, did so during the Extremaduran elections campaign over a stolen bag of votes at a post office. The police already established that they were common thieves and the affected individuals were able to vote again normally.

Now, however, if the PP does not clearly distance itself from Díaz Ayuso, it will be fueling the civil war climate that the far-right wants to impose and will be co-responsible for what may happen as a consequence.