Vox’s growth and Abascal’s success on television are unsettling the Spanish left

Madrid. Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox, appeared on television on Monday evening. It was not a tedious political debate, but an entertaining talk show, featuring live musical interludes, a particularly lively audience and hosted by a young and very popular comedian, David Broncano. Two weeks earlier, Pedro Sánchez had sat on that very same sofa, but the presence of a right-wing leader has sparked a debate in Spain about what some see as a dangerous normalisation of totalitarian ideologies.

Taking an excerpt from the interview in which Abascal wished the presenter of TVE, the Spanish state broadcaster, good luck (“because you’ll need it”, he told him with a smile), Sánchez himself wrote on X: “Threatening whilst smiling is not humour; it is degrading our democracy. This is what we are fighting for: to ensure that Spain does not return to being a country where far-right extremists threaten comedians and journalists. In the face of regression, mobilisation”.

Ernest Urtasun, Minister for Culture representing Sumar, the far-left group, struck the same ‘serious’ tone. “It struck me as a serious moment. We saw the far right in all its glory,” he said. Even more serious was the tone of the very serious Silvia Intxaurrondo, the journalist who dominates TVE’s morning schedule and is seen by half of Spain as the most resonant voice of ‘Sanchism’ on television. “Should the far right have a place on public television? Can Spanish television be neutral?” the journalist asked during her programme on Tuesday, the day after the interview that smashed all viewing records, even surpassing Sánchez’s own. A rhetorical question that reveals a peculiar notion of public service, given that Vox – whether one likes it or not (and there are many reasons not to) – is Spain’s third-largest party, the one growing fastest in the polls (currently polling at close to 20 per cent) and set to double its number of seats.

One might question whether it is appropriate to discuss politics against a backdrop of live music, a hand-picked audience (Abascal requested and was granted permission to select the audience through a casting agency), questions interspersed with jokes and humorous references, all while addressing one another informally as if in a pub. This approach, however, has been common for years and applies to all politicians and political infotainment. The recent train tragedy in Urda has prompted social media users to dig up the sketch in which the former Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, announced his appearance on a similar programme, miming a dance and poking fun at the poor service of the Spanish railways. Yet those service failures had not merely caused a few commuters to be late for work, but had also led to the 46 deaths in Adamuz last January.

The problem Spanish democrats face with the far right is that it is flourishing on ground that is already particularly fragile: that of Spanish democracy. Abascal was a young activist in the People’s Party in the Basque Country at a time and in a region when ETA terrorists were shooting at local councillors and municipal advisers. At that time, the Basque terrorist group even had a ‘political wing’ in Parliament, Herri Batasuna, which was not declared illegal until 2003, whilst ETA declared an end to its armed struggle in 2011. During the 1996 election campaign, one of the issues dominating the debate was whether it would be possible to broadcast one of their videos during the television airtime allocated to HB under Spanish law. In the few weeks leading up to the elections, in February, they had killed a former president of the Constitutional Court, Francisco Tomás y Valiente (assassinated inside the Autonomous University of Madrid), and the Basque Socialist leader Fernando Múgica (shot outside his home in San Sebastián).

Some of the key figures from that bloody period have found a new home, notably in EH Bildu, the party on whose votes the Sánchez government has relied for the past three years. Its spokesperson, Mertxe Aizpurua, has been a key figure in the parliamentary dynamics of this term: every time she spoke out in the name of democracy, half of Spain held its breath, recalling her journalistic work for local newspapers which listed the politicians to be targeted (in 1984 she was convicted of glorifying terrorism).

In short, the debate in Spain over the ‘cordon sanitaire’ surrounding the far right is taking on a decidedly surreal tone, and the fact that Vox is the only party polling favourably suggests that perhaps the strategy should be different. Or perhaps it should have been adopted many years ago, in relation to other forms of extremism.