Vox follows the electoral night in Barcelona from its bunker on Camp street. Some endowments of the Mossos d’Esquadra are deployed in the surroundings.
The place where journalists and supporters have been summoned is an L-shaped semi-basement. You would see the feet of passers-by if the windows were not covered by opaque Vox-colored curtains. Green, like the Spanish countryside.
Some columns are also painted green, the backstage wall is made up of photographs of cities veiled in green. A Spanish flag runs across the stage. There are also little Spanish flags, with their miniature flagpoles, on the work tables. The calendars also carry a Spanish flag. They are in color, they are courtesy of the AEGC, that is, the Spanish Association of Civil Guards. They are from 2023.
There are more or less the same number of information professionals as party affiliates. Wi-Fi is good. Trays with sandwiches and drinks circulate, those of the journalists run out soon.
A large screen offers live connections. Not with the polling stations or with the headquarters of different parties, but rather connects with Vox. Vox has its own electoral program, and apart from a side column on the screen that updates the count, with the number of deputies for each party, Vox’s monitoring of election night is counted by Vox. From time to time they interrupt the connection, and then the count of deputies disappears and the entire screen is occupied by Vox videos. One of them is directly in black and white, and recounts the deeds of Santiago Abascal illustrating to the Spaniards everything he will do when he arrives or is part of the government. Black and white, of course, is suggestive. People from the Spanish countryside appear, cows, bales of straw to feed them, reservoirs. Afterwards, the connection returns to the Vox headquarters, and at least on the side we can see how the count is going. This lasts until ten o’clock at night, when a journalist asks the press service for a connection to some –let’s say– standard television channel. Whichever. The truth is that the change is immediate, and from there the story is that of RTVE.
The results are consolidating, and the sympathizers who have come to the headquarters – a fortnight – are losing hope. The consolation that his loss is assumed by the Popular Party and in this way they can be his crutch to reach the government is fading away. No leader wants to speak at the Barcelona headquarters before Santiago Abascal. Maybe later.
The militants, many of them with ribbons with the Spanish flag on their wrists, look at the screen and shake their heads. They know that, no matter how they look at it, losing twenty deputies only has one name: sinking.
