Fear is the music of dictatorships. However, sometimes it also serves to get to power in democracies. The problem is that, combined with anger, it can turn the government over to unscrupulous politicians, professional con artists, or even real criminals and genocidals. It happened ninety years ago in Europe, but it’s been so long that some don’t remember it anymore. Perhaps for this reason, fear and anger have once again burst into the electoral scene, and also an emerging ultra-right that does not deny its past, although it assures that it does not intend to repeat it (unless attention is paid to its electoral program).
However, this irruption raises at least two questions: why and for what. The first is answered simply: nature bores the void. And the electoral market works the same way: if there is an unsatisfied demand, it won’t take long for the offer to appear. In this sense, it seems clear that, after a few decades of majority push for rights and freedoms, a pendulum effect is taking place and the voices of rejection are growing. It’s no secret that God writes in crooked lines and that progress is never linear.
The underlying explanation is based on several factors. The first, the generational shift: the segments between 18 and 44 vote for Vox much more than the average (and their percentage triples that of the older ones, a segment in which historical memory still operates). The second, the substantial changes in the human landscape as a result of a very heterogeneous immigration that exhibits more cultural distance with the receiving country: this leads to the fact that the perception of the number of foreigners almost doubles the real one and that in certain areas with a high density of immigrants the general feeling of insecurity exceeds the average by 10 to 15 points (CIS and CEO data).
Faced with these problematic realities, the ultra-right offers a vote of refuge to face the horizontal conflicts that it itself encourages: natives against outsiders, immigrants of one sign against immigrants of another, masculinity against feminism, traditional family against gender minorities… All this through an efficient segmentation of potential haters. And this dynamic is driven by the Bonist discourse of a certain left that proposes in practice a world without effective borders. Also, the radical proposals and rhetorical extravagances of this blessed progressivism in the defense of new rights (for example of animals), feed the rejection among sectors that previously maintained a more passive attitude.
Perhaps all this explains that in a society like Spain, which at the beginning of the millennium was very much committed to the recognition of a set of avant-garde rights (homosexual marriage, dignified death, etc.), an extremely aggressive right Donald Trump also burst into the United States after the presidential term of a progressive African-American. Naturally, national identity is a key ingredient of the far right and in the case of Spain, the Catalan secessionist attempt has also acted as a catalyst for more restrictive Spanish nationalism.
At this point, and in the context of the 23-J election, it is urgent to answer the second question (“what is Vox for”). And the answer, once again, seems simple: the far-right embodies a programmatic offer that caters to the fears and misgivings of certain sectors of the population. And this offer has a transversal character, since it breaks the traditional boundaries between progressives and conservatives and reaches segments of the sociological left (and this is where, for example, its significant support comes from those who define themselves as poor ).
However, the best demonstration of this ability to alter the traditional electoral balances exhibited by the new extreme right is in the evolution of the vote in many countries of the old continent. The attached tables reflect, with a few exceptions, the advance of the extreme right at the expense of the conventional right, but also of other electoral fishing grounds (including the Social Democrat). And the result of this is that this growth of the ultra-right also means an unprecedented expansion of the electoral space of the conservative bloc.
This phenomenon can be seen in countries such as Sweden or Finland (where, at the same time, the historic electoral hegemony of the centre-left has faded), but also in the south, such as France or Italy, where the irruption of the ultras consolidates above 50% of the combined vote of the centre-right and the extreme right. And this evolution also serves to explain the current conservative hegemony in Andalusia or the return of the right to power in Valencia. Without the irruption of Vox, the traditional center-right would hardly have come to power in Andalusia. And without the vote of the far-right, the PP would not have collected enough ballots on 28-M to evict the left-wing government in Valencia.
