Vox . Three letters, one word, one monosyllable. From the Latin “voz”. It is the phenomenon that is in vogue.

It grabs all the big headlines in digital and traditional newspapers. It’s on everyone’s lips; at family gatherings, at friends’ dinners. The national news opens daily with some news referring to the controversial political formation that has burst in a strident way in the Andalusian Parliament, as a result of the regional elections held on December 2, 2018. Never before have three letters had so many interpretations and debates. But, is it right to label it as a fascist party?

The party is led by Santiago Abascal Conde (Bilbao, 1976), a former militant of the Basque People’s Party, formerly known as “the party of the brave”, given the dark circumstances in that Spanish region during the eighties until well into the new millennium, where the terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A.) attacked, kidnapped and murdered politicians and civilians who were opposed to their struggle and ideology, with a special focus on the PPV. And although Vox is the surprise today, it is not a new party, but it was founded five years ago.

Vox, from ostracism to media stardom

As we have explained in the introductory paragraphs, the formation of Abascal is not a creation of the day before yesterday, but it has already been in the Spanish extra-parliamentary activity for five years, which is not media, a fact to be taken into account. Vox was formed as a political party and registered with the Ministry of the Interior in 2014, the result of a split from the centre-right “Partido Popular” party, whose former members were betrayed of their basic principles by the then Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey.

His early years were complicated and controversial from the beginning. Criticism of political correctness, meetings with the French National Front or the informal support of religious platforms such as Hazte Oír, were poorly accepted by his fellow citizens and political analysts from the outset.

The images of their members with loudspeakers in their hands on a wooden stool which the evangelical preacher did not predict a good future for them . Their persistence, tenacity and conviction have brought them good results and their discourse is debated daily on all television sets.

A 21st century fascist party?

There are an infinite number of columnists, opinion leaders and political scientists who have rushed to hang this label on the party that has achieved an unexpected result, by winning 12 seats in the Parliament of the Andalusian Government. Their communication mechanisms, disruptive speeches, high-flown words and staging have earned them this categorisation. But is Vox really a fascist party? Let’s analyze some data.

According to the political sciences -politology-, fascism is an ideology of exaltation of the leader, a discourse of constant appeal to the representation of the people (in these cases neglected), an authoritarian and, above all, undemocratic vision of what power is, whose media and public opinion are controlled by the government that the people have ceded to it. Giving up freedom in exchange for security and stability, as was the case in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The author of this ideology is Benito Mussolini, a thought that took place in the period of the two World Wars of the 20th century.

For the vast majority of the Spanish media, Vox meets the basic requirements to define this formation of fascists. Some experts in the field from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have no doubt. The authors rely, among other points, on the support it has received in its beginnings, and which it continues to receive today: Marine Le Pen and some members of the Francisco Franco National Foundation publicly showed their joy at the results achieved on 2 December 2018.

However, another reference in political analysis and Doctor in Political Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Jorge Verstrynge, stated on the microphones of A3 Media that “Vox has nothing like that. I’m telling you, I was a real fascist. These people have run in democratic elections, which breaks with the essential element of fascism”. Íñigo Errejón, founder and Secretary of Analysis and Political Change of the social democratic formation Podemos, was more ironic: “The people of Vox have not been voted for by 400,000 fascists” .

The background of Podemos

Is Vox a fascist party? This party has earned some enmity among the public opinion for sustaining some of the most controversial points of its electoral program, such as the repeal of the Integral Law of Gender Violence, the recentralization of the Public Administration, the defense -not by law- of the traditional family and of the Judeo-Christian cultural values that constituted modern Spain.

But is this fascism, or does it correspond to a media strategy to demonize the formation of Abascal? There is a similar precedent, not at all distant, of the party that achieved unexpected success five years ago in the European elections of 2014, and which is on the opposite axis to Vox of the political spectrum: Podemos. From Constitutional Spain, political activity and governance resided in the so-called “alternation” of the two-party system formed by the right (Partido Popular) and the left (Partido Socialista Obrero Español).

Thus, Podemos’s links with communism and chavism, which existed and still exist, served to polarize public opinion and portray Podemos as a communist party, without more, even though it did not comply with any of the typical characteristics of communist parties (starting by setting as one of its main objectives the collectivization of the means of production).

Something very similar happens with Vox, which although it openly expresses ideas that from the political left are branded as undemocratic, such as discrimination against homosexuals (it proposes to withdraw the right to marry, with all the legal impediments that this generates), or the possible support of sectors of Franco, it is not a fascist party. Nor does it justify the use of violence above the law, nor does it attempt to mobilize civilians to support the party by dominating the territory, nor does it manifest a cult of the leader.