Camouflaged among the bushes, Santiago Abascal waits for his prey, an eagle owl. “Waiting tomorrow to ‘hunt’ the elusive lord of the night,” the 47-year-old Vox candidate for the presidency of the Government writes on Twitter. The image is from almost a decade ago and shows a younger Abascal, crouched down and armed with a camera with a powerful telephoto lens. “I’m not a hunter,” he told Ana Rosa Quintana in an interview. “I like to photograph the birds the most. I really like nature, animals, the mountains. It is what I miss the most, ”he added. Immediately afterwards, he defended hunting and hunters, in tune with Vox’s ideology.
Born in Bilbao, but raised in Amurrio, Abascal’s life has been linked to politics since childhood. His grandfather was mayor during the Franco regime of this Álava municipality of 11,000 inhabitants, and his father belonged to Alianza Popular and was a leader of the PP in Álava for 35 years.
His father’s political activity put him in the spotlight of ETA and at the end of the 1990s the family business was burned down, a clothing store for which the terrorist group demanded the payment of money – the revolutionary tax – that he was not willing to to face. The son took out his weapons license to defend him. “I was with his security team as one more,” he said.
Abascal himself carried an escort in the years in which he exercised politics in the Basque Country. Two decades. Even though he has a degree in Sociology from the University of Deusto, he has lived from institutional positions since he was 23 years old. Affiliated with the PP since he was young, he was a councilor for Llodio, a member of the Álava General Assembly and a member of the Basque Parliament. In 2010, coinciding with the divorce of his first wife, with whom he has two children, he went to live in Madrid and there, under the protection of his friend Esperanza Aguirre, chained two charges of designation of community.
But in 2013 he left the PP, alleging insurmountable differences with the leadership for his actions in corruption cases and in the fight against ETA. And he founded Vox, an essentialist party, with an anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-European, anti-vaccine, and denier of climate change or gender violence ideology, among other flags that connect the party with other extreme-right formations, but with a neo-Francoist varnish.
The speech is crude, but Vox no longer fiercely fights the autonomous state, since it has entered territorial institutions due to the pacts with the PP. Abascal now longs for the Government of Spain. He could be vice president with Feijóo at Moncloa.
On his Instagram profile, he shared photos a few years ago in shorts, muscled, in outdoor activities and even walks with legionnaires, although he did not serve in the military. He fosters an image of a tough but easygoing man, who seeks votes in rural areas and working-class neighborhoods, half rural man half leader who rides a horse, a skill he learned from his father. His suits, yes, are always too tight, but he has an adviser at his house, his wife, Lidia Bedman, an influencer and successful blogger, with whom he has two children.
