Is Vox really a fascist party?

Vox. Three letters, one word, a monosyllable. From the Latin "voice". It is the phenomenon that is fashionable.

Make all the big headlines in digital and traditional newspapers. It is on everyone's lips; at family gatherings, at friends' dinners. The national newscasts open daily with some news regarding the controversial political formation that has stormed into 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 correct to stamp it the category of fascist party?

The party is led by Santiago Abascal Conde (Bilbao, 1976), a former member of the Basque Popular Party, formerly known as "the party of the brave", given the dark circumstances that took place in that Spanish region during the eighties until well into the new millennium, where the terrorist gang Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A.) attacked, kidnapped and assassinated politicians and the civilian population opposed to their struggle and ideology, with special fixation by 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, Abascal's training is not a creation of the day before yesterday, rather, he has been in the Spanish extra-parliamentary activity for five years now, not in the media, a fact to take into account. Vox was established as a political party and registered with the Ministry of the Interior in 2014, the result of a split from the center-right party "Popular Party", whose former members saw their basic principles betrayed by the then President of the Government of Spain, Don 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 Make yourself heard, they were initially a bad acceptance by their fellow citizens and political analysts.

The images of its members with loudspeakers in hand perched on a wooden stool like an evangelical preacher did not predict a good future for them.. Their persistence, tenacity and conviction have brought them good results and their speech is debated on a daily basis on all television sets.

A fascist party of the 21st century?

There are infinite columnists, opinion scientists and political scientists who have rushed to hang this label on the party that has achieved an unexpected result, by obtaining 12 seats within the Parliament of the Board of Andalusia. Their communication mechanisms, disruptive speeches, high-sounding words and staging have earned them that categorization. But is Vox really a fascist party? Let's analyze some data.

According to political science -politicalology-, fascism is an ideology of exalting 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 them. Giving up freedom in exchange for security and stability, as was the case in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The authorship of this ideology corresponds to Benito Mussolini, 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 as a fascist. Some experts on the subject from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona have no doubt. The authors are based, among other points, on the support it has received in its early days, and which it continues to receive today: Marine Le Pen and some members of the Francisco Franco National Foundation They publicly showed their joy for the results obtained on December 2, 2018.

However, another benchmark of political analysis and doctor in Political Science from the University Autonomous of Madrid, Jorge Verstrynge, assured in the microphones of A3 Media that “Vox has nothing of that. I tell you that I was a real fascist. These people have stood for 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: "400,000 fascists have not voted for those of Vox".

The antecedent of Podemos

Is Vox a fascist party? This party has earned a certain enmity among public opinion for holding some of the most controversial points of its electoral program, such as the repeal of the Comprehensive Law on 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 Abascal formation? There is a similar precedent, not far from it, of the game that achieved an unexpected success five years ago. years in the European Elections of 2014, and that is on the opposite axis to Vox of the political spectrum: We can. From Constitutional Spain, political activity and governance resided in the so-called "alternation" of the bipartisanship that formed the right (Partido Popular) and the left (Partido Socialista Obrero Spanish).

Thus, Podemos' links with communism and Chavismo, which existed and exist, served to polarize public opinion and portray Podemos as a communist party, without more, despite the fact that it did not meet any of the typical characteristics of Communist parties (starting by setting as one of their main objectives the collectivization of the media production).

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