Giving birth for the homeland

At the summer reception for the King and Queen of Spain at Marivent Palace in Mallorca (a social event we don't have the space or talent to praise adequately), Gabriel Le Senne shared with King Felipe VI his concern about the low birth rate in the Balearic Islands: "We Mallorcans are heading for extinction," he said, first before the world. For readers who aren't familiar with the matter, Le Senne is the president of the island's Parliament and was also recently appointed president of Vox in the Balearic Islands, so he tried to debut in his new role with statesmanlike conversation. He is also awaiting trial for a hate crime, following the famous tantrum in which he tore down the photo of Aurora Picornell and the Rojas del Molinar, communists and trade unionists murdered by fascism during the Civil War. Le Senne believes we Mallorcans are becoming extinct because Mallorcan women have few children, yet many immigrants arrive. But the reality is that we'll be in danger of becoming extinct if his party gains more power than it already has. And some of us will become extinct sooner than others.

Before the impassive smile of Felipe VI, who always fraternizes happily with the representatives of the ultra-nationalist right (his very reign has always been controlled by them), Le Senne unraveled a good part of the ideology of the Spanish extreme right: the lie of demographic replacement by immigrants that sells xenophobia against immigrants who endanger the homeland, anti-feminism (the not too encrypted message is: women must return to their traditional roles of raising, caring for and maintaining the home, with the exception of the privileged ones of certain elites) and the other side of that same patriarchal coin, which is natalism.

Natalism is another ideological hook, not exactly new, designed to leverage some easily summoned fear in terms of power. In this case, it's the easiest, most basic fear: "we" will disappear if we don't have more children than we do, because right now "they" have many more children than we do. It's a message we've heard before (Jordi Pujol already urged Catalan women to have children), but it has now gained global traction in the discourses of the overheated and invigorated far right. From the Trump administration (where JD Vance is the pro-natalist spokesperson par excellence) to people as stimulating as Putin, Orbán, and Milei, all agree on imposing a mission on women that evidently entails a biological and vital condemnation: they must give birth to save the country.

This is also the line taken by the discourses of Vox in Spain and the Catalan Alliance in Catalonia, as well as other nationalist sectors that indulge in fantasies about fierce midwives coming to save the Catalan land from perdition, like Almogavars in the delivery room. Be careful, because this discourse is as perverse as it is easy to transmit, literally due to its visceral nature.