Abascal is perfectly understood

Cornellà de LlobregatA calm Sunday midday among industrial warehouses resting in the impersonal southwest of Cornellà de Llobregat. Not so calm for a chronicler who, on journalistic duty, blends into a queue of neighbors waiting to enter the auditorium for Santiago Abascal's rally. Held back by a quiet police cordon, a group of anti-fascists heckles us with professional flair: in the front row, young people with their faces covered, CGT flags, anarchist 'estelades' and many mohawks; behind them, teenagers in t-shirts from the Sant Boi de Llobregat scout group and parents and grandparents of a more familiar militancy. The star cry is “Get fascists out of our neighborhoods!”.

The thing is that Vox supporters are such normal and disorganized people that there is more awkwardness than violence. There are no skinheads or Francoist iconography, but rather families and heterogeneous groups of friends who range from Louis Vuitton brands and dark-tan-almost-orange faces to generic white-label hoodies. My companions in the queue look with a mixture of strangeness and contempt at those who heckle them and activate defensive rhetoric: “The problem is that none of these work”, “What are they doing with a Palestine flag, if they would kill them there”. (Translation note: all the phrases from the Vox family are in Spanish in the original, but in more than three or four small groups I hear Catalan being spoken privately. This poorly resolved bilingualism is more distressing than spontaneous and when it is transferred to the rally it translates into constant linguistic errors, communicative suffering and caricature at the level of Albert Rivera from Polònia).

The organization hands out wristbands with the Spanish flag, Abascal arrives and climbs onto a van to announce, megaphone in hand showing off his pecs, that there is not enough room for everyone. It is a prefabricated image (the photographers had been notified hours ago) for a visual epic that does not correspond to the very low tone of the event. To all those who, like myself, until today had only seen the most incendiary clips of Abascal, I convey that the Vox leader neither has charisma nor masters the art of emotional modulation of the masses, and most of the time people listen to him with a palpable disappointment between expectations and reality. Mind you, more than two or three ladies shout: “Handsome!”

Inside the auditorium, packed to the rafters, a sea of Spanish flags and constant outbursts of the cry that shatters the applause meter: “Pedro Sánchez, son of a bitch!”. The campaign song, which makes one wonder if AI models should have any constitutional right to refuse certain torture, says “It is not something new / it is something ancestral / it is family and it is Spain / it is national priority”.

The moment for immigrants

Vox candidates dedicate 90% of the rally to talking about salaries, pensions, and young people who cannot access housing with rhetoric that any leftist party could sign off on. The catch is that, when pronounced with a procedural tone, everyone present understands that these sentences are a mere preamble until it is time to redirect the blame towards immigrants. Juanjo Aizcorbe does it when he says “First, our own people,” Ignacio Garriga when he explains that in the neighborhoods and parks of Cornellà there are no longer the happy communities of the past (?) and Abascal when he culminates the speech by saying that “Spain is defended to the last consequences”. The rally never ends up sliding along emotionally clean due to an irresolvable tension between the obligation to say nothing openly xenophobic and these calculatedly ambiguous safety valves.

Abascal shouts something about “Long live Catalonia and long live Spain”, and everyone leaves the event energized. Aside from the usual weirdos, the vast majority of attendees do not radiate any kind of militant hatred, but faith towards the promise of change regarding the usual political parties. I find it so important to note this normality of the grassroots that I doubt whether to finish with what happens to me next. Returning to Barcelona by bus, a woman with the Spanish flag as a cape forgets to request the stop and, annoyed, demands accountability from the driver who, naturally, is not to blame at all. Until, just before getting off at the next stop, the woman looks at him, sings a song that bears the title of a racist insult against Latin Americans that I will spare myself from reproducing, and runs away with her tail between her legs. At the end of the day, that a thing is not explicitly said at a rally does not mean that the message does not remain crystal clear.