The party is a strong position to push for ministerial jobs in a right-wing coalition.
MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has finally done something the far right approves of — calling a snap election on Nov. 29 that the anti-immigrant Vox party is hailing as “Spain’s last chance to be Spain again.”
Polling third in the race, Vox is Spain’s leading nationalist, euroskeptic force and it sees next month’s contest as its prime opportunity to remold the country after eight years of Sánchez’s socialist premiership by getting its people into top ministerial jobs.
Party leader Santiago Abascal greeted Monday’s election announcement as “excellent news.” His delight is hardly surprising given that polls suggest Vox is on track to make the biggest gains of any major party.
While the center-right People’s Party is expected to come first — with about 33% of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — it will almost certainly have to team up with Vox, which commands support of about 18%, to build a stable coalition.
Abascal will then be able to demand the inclusion of key elements of Vox’s agenda as its price for that partnership. Its goals include deportations of undocumented migrants, a benefits preference for Spaniards over foreign nationals, slashing EU health and safety rules in the farming sector and rolling back support for gender equality and the LGBTQ+ community.
Vox secured 33 of the 350 seats in Congress in 2023, but is now set to double that. Under the PP’s coalition leadership, it should be able to form part of a comfortable majority.
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“This time round, Vox is much stronger,” José Antonio Fúster, spokesperson for the party and a member of the Madrid regional parliament, said. “We are going into a very important election, not so much for us, as for Spaniards … This is the last hope for Spain to be Spain again.”
Fúster would not be drawn on which ministries his party has set its sights on, warning against “selling the bearskin before it has been hunted.”
Pointing to talks with the PP in recent months in four regions where the two parties now govern in coalition, he said the shaping of policy was being prioritized ahead of institutional power. “That is the last thing we negotiate because it is the least important,” he said.
Pet portfolios
In August, Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé told POLITICO that forming part of the government was not the only option open to his party, but that in a hypothetical coalition with the PP, his party would seek a number of ministries “in proportion to our vote share.”
That would amount to a significant percentage. If current polls translate into results in November, Vox would be in a position to claim about a third of ministerial posts.
Analysts expect Vox to press for portfolios that focus on its pet policies, such as agriculture, domestic policy, immigration and industry. The culture and education portfolios could also be of interest to the party, given their relevance in the hard right’s campaign against so-called wokeism.
The regions where the PP and Vox currently govern together — Andalusia, Aragón, Castile and León, and Extremadura — offer clues: The government departments that Vox controls are mainly linked to agriculture, welfare benefits and the family.
The party is heading into the election campaign espousing three main ideas: the concept of “national priority” — ensuring that Spaniards have access to public services and benefits ahead of foreign nationals — a clampdown on immigration and broad deregulation.
Although Vox’s rise to prominence was driven by its fierce stance against Catalan nationalism nearly a decade ago, that debate has faded from the political arena. Now, its focus is, like its European far-right counterparts, more firmly on immigration-related matters.
“Before, Vox talked about immigration, but it wasn’t the nuclear issue it has become,” said Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book about the European far right. “Now, when Vox talks about social security payments, it talks about immigration; when it talks about the economy, it talks about immigration. Immigration is the issue that dictates everything.”
Vox also subscribes to the “remigration” policy being touted by many far-right parties, under which undocumented migrants and those who commit crimes would be deported. The PP has appeared to respond to Vox’s hard line by toughening its own stance, calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals and opposing a government migrant legalization program.
In each of the regions where the two parties are in coalition, Vox has ensured that its senior partner agreed to formally include the national priority principle in their governing agreement.
“But when it comes to national priority, the PP has added the caveat that it has to be implemented in line with the law,” said Miguel González, a journalist at the El País daily newspaper and author of a book about Vox. Legislation prevents discrimination against foreign nationals when it comes to accessing public benefits and services, meaning the policy is currently little more than symbolic in those regions.
“In reality, in order to implement this properly, you’d have to change the immigration law,” González added.
Vox is eyeing an overhaul of that legislation to make it a workable policy.
“It’s very possible to change laws that are bad for Spaniards, so we have to roll them back and introduce new laws, making sure that Spaniards are not last in line,” Fúster said.
Deregulation nation
Deregulation also offers a platform from which to attack EU health-and-safety norms that are reviled by the farming sector, one of Vox’s main voter bases.
Fúster accepted that this could lead to clashes with the European Commission, but insisted that pressure from what he described as a rising tide of European parties sharing Vox’s values would “make sure that Brussels returns to the path of common sense.”
PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has criticized phytosanitary restrictions on farmers but has shown little appetite for conflict with European institutions.
In social policy, González said Vox might use the broader notion of deregulation to dismantle funding for gender equality and LGBTQ+ departments and projects, as it has done on a local level. Fúster was reluctant to be drawn on this: “We believe in the equality of Spaniards,” he said. “We don’t believe that anyone should have privileges above others.”
Fernández Vázquez of Carlos III University said that the origins of Vox suggest a bumpy ride for the PP. Vox would be the first far-right party to enter government in half a century since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 — and there would likely be clashes.
The far-right party formed in 2013 as a breakaway from the conservatives in frustration at what its founders saw as the pusillanimity of the PP in the face of Catalan separatism.
“I think the relationship between Vox and PP [in government] will be a bad one,” the researcher said. “Abascal and his colleagues are going to enjoy showing up Feijóo whenever they can, portraying him as lukewarm and weak.”
Fúster accepted “it could be a difficult relationship,” adding that the PP “don’t see things the way we do and we don’t share their vision.”
“We’re not willing to make concessions, we’re willing to have a frank, open and reasonable negotiation.”
But for now, the priority is simply to remove the Socialists. In his traditionally combative style, Abascal insisted the election was a chance to hold on to “the peace, prosperity and freedom that a mafioso government wants to snatch from us forever.”
Max Griera contributed to this article.