"It works"

In an interview with El Periódico and published this Sunday, the PP candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said that “government with Vox can work, it already does so in four autonomous communities”. It was not so long ago that PP leaders, and especially Feijóo, avoided being photographed with those from Vox at demonstrations, so as not to be associated with the far right. Those were the times when Vox called the PP “derechita cobarde”, while they were eating into their ground and electorate.

The operation of whitewashing and normalization of a far-right party like Vox within the Spanish political system began with its first major event at Vistalegre, on October 6, 2019, seven years ago now. A kind of inaugural ceremony to let all Spanish ultranationalism know that reinforcements had finally arrived, after the initially successful, but later failed, experiment of Ciudadanos. All the agents who could participate in this normalization of Vox have done so, from the media that presented them as a liberal right-wing or center-right party, to the judicial system, which immediately admitted them to exercise private prosecution in high-profile media trials such as the Procés trial. In fact, Vox's activity in the courts has been particularly visible, and has expanded and deepened the path of the judicialization of politics that the PP had already been following for some time. In this way, we have seen how an openly pro-Franco and pro-Nazi party dedicated itself to filing lawsuits and complaints that were complacently accepted in the courts, while perfectly democratic politicians and civil representatives (from Catalan independence, the Spanish left, and socialists, including even the president of the Spanish government) have been dragged into the mud of lawfare.

A qualitative step in the normalization of Vox took place starting in 2023, when the PP opened up to government agreements, and even joint governments, with the far-right, in regional and municipal governments. As Feijóo says, these governments "work". The "functioning" consists of the subordination of the PP to the directives of Vox, which impose their demands through the not-so-subtle, but effective, method of coercion: if you do not do what we tell you, we will not vote for your budgets or we will directly break the agreements unilaterally. The early elections in several autonomous communities that the PP forced to give a sense of victory to the empty Feijóo and try to distance themselves from Vox served precisely for the opposite: today, in the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Country, Andalusia, and Castile and León, the PP presidents do not dare to take any step without the approval of the fascists, who impose more than ever their racist, patriarchal, denialist, deregulatory and, of course, openly hostile agenda towards diversity and the Catalan language and culture. They do indeed "work", and, if they obtain the control mechanisms of the State government, they will "work" at full capacity.