Right-wing Vox party wants to ‘drain the swamp, build that wall and make Spain great again’
In Spain we are considered the fascist, ultraradical Right,” says Iván Espinosa de los Monteros. “But then Spain is the world champion of political correctness.” He prefers a comparison with Donald Trump and can’t resist promising, in his perfect, American-accented English, to “drain the swamp, build that wall, and make Spain great again”.
In Spain’s case that means firing a lot of civil servants, replacing the fences around Ceuta and Melilla – two Spanish enclaves in North Africa – with walls, and dramatically cutting taxes and bureaucracy. “We’re really, really optimistic about the future of our great country,” he says echoing, consciously or not, the US president.
Neatly bearded and suavely dressed, Mr Espinosa is the international face of Vox, a nationalist party led by Santiago Abascal, which in the past year has risen from nowhere to a decisive position in the politics of the EU’S fifth-biggest economy.
Last December it won 12 seats in Andalusian elections, helping to end almost 40 years of socialist rule. Now, ahead of a general election scheduled for the end of April, it is aiming higher.
Such ambition marks a political transformation. For the first five years of its existence Vox, founded in 2013, barely troubled the opinion pollsters, as analysts suggested that memories of Franco, and the right-of-centre domination of the People’s Party (PP), had inoculated Spain from national populist surges familiar elsewhere.
Now, however, Vox has leapt from 1 per cent in polls to 11 per cent, putting it in a position to form a Right-wing bloc with the PP (on 20 per cent) and the Citizens (15 per cent). Together the three look odds-on to oust the Socialist Party of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, who took over last year after toppling the Pp-led government of Mariano Rajoy, but whose own unstable coalition has since collapsed.
“I don’t expect the socialists to be able to form a government,” says Mr Espinosa, in the boardroom of a hotel in London, the third stop in a brisk tour after Poland and Bulgaria.
“We three parties – PP, Citizens and Vox – will have to reach agreement. And we will.”
Even being the most junior partner in government would have been far beyond the party’s recent aspirations. But Mr Espinosa now expects to do better still. “I expect us to get to 15 per cent,” he says. “We will not be third of the three parties in that coalition. We will have a larger share of influence in the new government than that.”
Abroad, such influence is likely to be seen as further evidence of public discontent manifesting itself in political extremism – from Golden Dawn in Greece to the National Rally (RN) in France. But Mr Espinosa is keen to distinguish Vox from those parties, and says he would “never appear on a platform with them” or with a leader like France’s Marine Le Pen. The only thing Vox shares with the RN, he says, is its hard line on immigration. He wants Spain to be able to say “how many [immigrants] and which ones” are allowed in and demand those arriving “accept the basic rules that the Western world has developed to create the most advanced civilisation in world history”.
He puts Vox on a par with Poland’s Law and Justice party or, in Britain, with the Conservatives. The Vox delegation says that, despite the Brexit turmoil, it met “two or three” Tory MPS on its trip to the UK.
Mr Espinosa certainly shares with many in the Conservative Party an unvarnished advocacy of wealth and job creation, low taxes and small government, proposing to lower income tax to 21 per cent, do away with many other taxes altogether, and slash the public sector to balance the books.
“I want these people [civil servants] to feel the thrill of finding a job – going back to the real world as opposed to living off other people’s taxes,” he says. “There’s no efficiency whatsoever.”
He is equally dismissive of Brussels – “such a concentration of waste” – but has no plans to leave the EU, from which Spain is a net recipient of several billion euros each year.
The EU is instead for Vox the site of a cultural battle – having, in Mr Espinosa’s eyes, been
“taken over by this cohort of progressives imposing a certain philosophical agenda”. Such derision only drives Vox’s admiration for Trump and Steve Bannon, his former political adviser, who is visiting Spain next week and is close to a key figure in the party, Rafael Bardají. “Trump has been very strong against the progressive, politically correct movement in the US,” says Mr Espinosa.
Yet Vox’s “anti-progressive” line is controversial, extending to a proposal to ban abortion except in medical emergencies and following rape, and even those procedures would not be paid for by the state. That, as well as its plan to “erase” a domestic violence law which it says “encourages feminist supremacy”, has angered many. Such uncompromising language extends to foreign policy too, and to Britain.
Mr Espinosa describes Gibraltar as “a European colony within Europe”, and talks of “a gradual process” to take it back. In his eyes, that begins with the territory’s airstrip and water supply – not covered, he says, by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which granted Gibraltar to the UK in perpetuity.
He goes on: “If the UK leaves the EU and we’ve no agreement on Gibraltar, then Gibraltar technically is like a country-nation, you need to have borders, you need to close it down. And I don’t think that would be good for anyone.”
And while Vox, Mr Espinosa says, has no interest in issuing Britain an “ultimatum”, he adds: “We need to be strong and we need to be clear.”
If that ruffles feathers in Britain, it is only a logical extension of the centrepiece of Vox’s agenda, which
‘I don’t expect the socialists to be able to form a government… we will have a larger share of influence’
‘The two greatest threats Spain faces today are the separatists and the radical Left’
aims to reverse the decentralisation and regional autonomy which it claims has fatally undermined the concept of the Spanish nation, and pride in its language, its symbols, its military. That is a message which it claims has cross-party appeal, and is helping it win voters not just on the Right, but from socialist rivals and harder-left Podemos too.
Again, it is a policy which inevitably sets Vox on a collision course with the UK. “When the UK calls and says we’ve found bank robbers in Marbella, the Spanish police arrive in hours, arrests them and sends them over,” says Mr Espinosa. “When the Germans ring and say we’ve found this child molester hiding in Majorca, we’ll get him too. But when we ring and say our criminals are hiding in plain sight – one of them is a teacher at Edinburgh University – the UK comes back and says ‘We don’t trust your judicial system. We don’t really believe Spain is a democracy’.”
The criminals he’s talking about are exiled leaders of the Catalan government, and include Prof Clara Ponsati, who was the breakaway region’s education minister (and is actually at St Andrews).
“We think Spain deserves more respect,” Mr Espinosa insists.
Vox’s determination to foster Spanish national identity is part of what he unflinchingly calls a “moral and political reconquista” to tackle “the two greatest threats Spain faces today – the separatists and the radical Left”.
But he does not accept that “reconquista” – which refers to the centuries-long battle between Christian and Muslim armies for control of Iberia – is a loaded term. “We admire what’s left of the Islamic culture in Spain,” he says. “It’s part of our history.” He pauses, then adds: “By the way, part of our history is also fighting against them for 800 years.”