The 'national priority', a euphemism with a bloody history

The concept of national priority that the Spanish far-right is promoting today – with Vox at the forefront and a PP that has accepted it without much critical spirit or nuances (this summer they have included it in the Valencian Country budgets)– it is no historical novelty, but a euphemism with a long and dark genealogy. Behind its administrative and neutral appearance hides a profoundly disturbing logic: the idea that there exists a human community authentic and pure, whose rights are ontologically superior to those who, by birth, religion, language or ethnicity, are classified as the others. This narrative constructs a hierarchy of deserved humanities in which some fully deserve and others deserve less, or not at all. And this hierarchy, however subtle it may seem in its initial formulation, tends historically to justify first discrimination, then segregation, later expulsion, and, in its most extreme versions, extermination. It is, therefore, not a harmless starting point that can be stopped at will at some reasonable point along the way, but a slope with a known direction.

Contemporary history is full of examples that illustrate how this rhetoric has operated in radically different contexts, adapting to each culture but always maintaining the same essential logical structure. Trump's America first – a slogan already used by the isolationist and anti-Semitic American movement of the 1930s – translated into the criminalization of migrants, migratory bans, and dehumanizing rhetoric. Modi's hindutva movement in India turns Muslims, Christians, and Dalits into second-class citizens in their own land, with lynchings and discriminatory citizenship laws. In Israel, the nation-state law of 2018 and an official discourse that has described Palestinians as human animals or Amalek have preceded a military campaign described as genocide by international organizations. And beyond these well-known cases, ivoirité in Ivory Coast, Mobutu's authenticité of Zaire, Milosevic's Greater Serbia, the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis – described as cockroaches before being murdered – the denial of citizenship to the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the European fascisms of the 1930s – Nazism, Francoism, Maurras's Action Française which inspired the Vichy regime – demonstrate that this pattern is not exclusive to any particular region or culture.

What unites all these cases beyond their geographical and historical differences is an identical logical structure and a well-documented sequence of consequences: first, an authentic and pure national identity is constructed; then, it is defined who is left out; next, negative, threatening, or contaminating traits are attributed to them; then they are deprived of rights and excluded from public space, normalizing hostility towards that identity; and finally, when political conditions permit, cultural and structural violence gives way to physical violence. This process is not inevitable or automatic – democratic institutions, active civil society, and critical education can interrupt it – but it is a recurrent pattern, with a historical solidity that should deeply alarm. Adopting the language of national priority applied to housing, benefits, employment, or social services without nuance is not simply responding to an electoral demand: it is normalizing a political grammar with one of the most violent and lethal track records of modernity. It is legitimizing a way of thinking that classifies human beings into categories of desert based on their origin, that turns identity into a criterion of distributive justice, and that has served, time and again throughout history, to prepare the ideological ground for exclusion, persecution, and extermination. Calling this "common sense" or "defense of Spanish citizens" does not make it less dangerous, on the contrary: it makes it more dangerous because it grants it the cover of normality.