‘I’m an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always.’ Paul Auster’s words in 4321 resonate with the surprising turn of fortune against Spain’s populist radical right party – bucking the European trend toward the political extremes. Six years ago, Vox was surging in the polls, having secured its first-ever parliamentary seat in a regional parliament the year prior. But in the 2019 election, the party underperformed expectations, receiving only 24 seats in the national parliament; in 2023 it lost 19 of these seats and remains a distant third place in current polling.
Looking back at these reversals of the populist radical right amid a contemporary global landscape increasingly defined by the rise of reactionary populism offers a critical dose of optimism: the rise of the far right is not inevitable. Six years on, there are still lessons to be learned from how Vox’s 2019 campaign and media strategy backfired. The failure of the party’s self-styled vanguard against a ‘woke dictatorship’ demonstrates how the success of populist movements like it hinges on a fragile – and reversible – relationship with their anti-populist opponents.
Just as the forces of left-wing populism of the Podemos party and its founder, Pablo Iglesias, both mobilised supporters and sparked outrage among traditionalist Spain, Vox’s own campaign strategy may have unified ‘the people’ against it. Ultimately, its approach – which included, as Ariadna Arbolí Pujol previously wrote for the OPR, zealous threats toward Catalonia and a shocking redrawing of the boundaries of the political right by normalising positions that had previously been considered too extreme for mainstream right-wing parties – offended more Spanish voters than it attracted.
Vox’s turn of fortune, then, may demonstrate why it is so important to incorporate ‘anti-populism into the study of populism proper’, as political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis explained in an article entitled ‘Populism, Anti-Populism and Democracy’. He observes that populists rarely refer to themselves as such, rather it is a pejorative condemnation from an anti-populist establishment. Paradoxically, then, the ability of these far-right populist parties to characterise themselves as the victims or underdogs of an elitist political establishment is largely contingent on pejorative condemnations from anti-populists.
Perhaps the main lesson from Vox’s failures in 2019 and 2023 is that the relationship between populism and anti-populism is not only ‘contingent’ and uncertain but also radically reversible: In Spain, the dynamic between populism and its detractors unexpectedly galvanised support for the opposing side.
While the surge of far-right populism in the United States, Germany, Italy, and France has recently dominated headlines, Spain has so far resisted this trend. After Vox’s 2019 underperformance, the country re-elected a progressive coalition, expanded LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and recently became the world’s fastest-growing major economy. These outcomes in the Spanish case align with Paul Auster’s ‘occasional flashes of optimism’ amid widespread pessimism about the political extremes being so often warranted. In fact, perhaps the alt-right’s populist success in dislocating the status-quo obscures its inherent and paradoxical fragility: right-wing populism’s fundamental reliance on antagonism and crisis makes it vulnerable to the very forces it seeks to mobilise against.
Vox and its ‘Constitutive Outside’
In April 2019, just twenty-one days after Barack Obama spoke in Seville’s Palacio de Congresos against the rise of populism, fascism, and machismo in Spain, Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal gave an address in the same auditorium (with the crowd overflowing the venue), crying out, ‘The Reconquista has started in the south’. He was comparing Vox’s watershed 2018 victory in a race for a seat in southern Andalucía to the military campaigns which united the northern Catholic kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula against their southerly Muslim foes and led to the establishment of Spain. Ironically, this rhetorical reversal of the historical north-south dynamic foreshadowed his party’s misplaced confidence in a sweeping victory in the upcoming national elections. Abascal’s Reconquista reference mirrors Vox’s populist media strategy: to unite ‘the people’ against its antagonist others.
As theorised by Ernesto Laclau in a 2006 contribution to Critical Inquiry and reflected in Vox’s rhetoric, populism is a discursive intervention that constructs ‘the people’ against a ‘constitutive other.’ In Vox’s 2019 campaign, this discursive other was the so-called ‘woke dictatorship’, a catch-all term encompassing feminists, separatists, the elitist political establishment, and immigrants. As Abascal himself stated, ‘Evidently, we are not leftist or separatist, we are everything else.’
Viewed through Laclau’s lens, Vox’s cultural reconquista is less an attempt to revive Spain’s dictatorship under Franco or medieval nostalgia but a populist rebranding of Spain’s ‘silent majority’ pushing back against a caricatured leftist ‘invasion.’ This represents an alternate perspective to those who link contemporary European far-right movements to their fascist predecessors. While Vox clearly draws on Francoist and traditionalist symbols in its opposition to historical-memory projects and nostalgic appeals to the Spanish empire, its strongest support is among younger voters, none of whom lived through Spain’s dictatorship. This youth support points instead to the party’s initially successful populist media campaign. Unpacking Vox’s polemical social media strategy may therefore prove more instructive for understanding their contemporary appeal than chasing bellicose and nostalgic historical allusions.
Vox’s 2019 media strategy, as advised by Steve Bannon (Trump’s erstwhile Chief Strategist turned global far-right populism booster), focused almost exclusively on social media and avoided ‘woke’ or ‘dictatorial‘ mainstream media outlets. Instead, Vox became the Spanish political party with the largest online following.
One of the most circulated clips of the campaign, an April 2019 interview segment posted on Vox’s official YouTube channel with the title ‘Worker teaches woke journalist a lesson [Lección de un currante a un periodista progre]’, encapsulates the party’s discursive opposition against caricatured ‘out-of-touch leftist elites’. In the video, a plasterer defends Vox to the bewilderment of a reporter from CTXT (a socialist outlet). The interviewer says: ‘But you’re a worker! Don’t you have class consciousness? Do you like animal torture?’ He responds:
‘So what? Pablo Iglesias is also a communist worker who lives in a house worth a hundred million pesetas! My wife and I support Vox because the right delivers good wages for hard work, because I enjoy bullfighting and because Vox is the only party that protects women by advocating for the life imprisonment of women killers.’
The interview reached over a million views in a day and became emblematic of Vox’s 2019 electoral campaign. The interviewee’s rhetoric harkens to traditional symbols (bullfighting and the peseta) and frames progressive policies as existential threats to Spanish identity. It captures what Pierre Ostiguy describes as ‘flaunting of the low’ in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Populism: The way populist discourse appeals to so-called ‘low culture’ by turning socio-cultural markers of working-class marginalisation into central attributes of the demos. Vox’s self-identification via antagonism with its left establishment ‘other’ is on display in this video through the irony of a humble labourer being stopped by a patronising ‘lefty’ journalist who feels entitled to deride him for holding politically incorrect views.
Throughout the campaign, Vox sought to reclaim the moral high ground on issues of class, gender, race, and immigration by championing unlikely partisans confronting the contemptuous left. For example, in a March 2019 TV debate with journalist Elisa Beni from Antena 3’s Espejo Público, Bertrand Ndongo – an immigrant from Cameroon and an outspoken Vox supporter – declares that ‘Spain is a wonderful country. Here, there is no racism.’ Beni interrupts him, ‘You must think you’re Alice in Wonderland, of course there is racism in Spain!’ Ndongo’s replied, ‘I have the feeling that you always need to speak badly of Spain. If Spain is going so badly for you, just leave the country!’
Vox’s March 12 Instagram post of the exchange aims to refute the common critiques of Vox as xenophobic, rendering them mere fantasy on the part of the deluded, hypocritical, and hysterical left. Meanwhile, Vox manages to present Ndongo’s assimilationist discourse as wholly uncontroversial, given that even Cameroonian migrants agree with Vox’s immigration policies, which include a Trumpian pledge to build walls around Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s African exclaves.
Anti-Populism as Mobilising Force
Although commonplace, these inflammatory alt-right populist media strategies have their own Achilles heel. Vox’s underperformance in 2019 underscores Stavrakakis’ aforementioned claim that anti-populism is integral to populism’s trajectory. Vox’s rise relied on its vilification by its anti-populist opponents, which Vox weaponised to cultivate a self-image of ‘the underdog.’ On social media, this populist campaign appeared successful. But Vox’s fast-growing media campaign also galvanised anti-fascist protests and strategic voting. When Vox’s opponents – including progressives, centrists and Catalans – mobilised against its incendiary rhetoric, they exposed the reversible nature of the party’s discursive identity politics. The 2019 election saw record turnout as voters overwhelmingly rejected Vox’s polarizing agenda. Vox’s social media strategy backfired as its message failed to resonate beyond an online echo chamber.
The 2019 Vox campaign and the subsequent Spanish election outcome reveal how the reversibility of the dynamic between populism and anti-populism. It is often said that populism relies on anti-populist contestations to portray itself as the underdog; this is evident in Vox’s claims of being the victim of a ‘woke dictatorship.’ What is seldom discussed is the reverse, or instances when progressive or establishment politics come to be perceived as under threat by far-right populism in a way that unexpectedly revitalises them.
Vox and the Nothing Is Ever Always Paradox
Spain’s 2019 election result exemplifies the theme in Auster’s 4321 of how disenchantment can sporadically be overturned. Vox’s widely anticipated electoral success failed to materialise in 2019 because the party’s rhetoric and media strategy whipped up an anti-populist backlash that transformed the Spanish political landscape. Despite the party’s efforts to construe its movement as a cultural Reconquista against a common enemy, Vox’s campaign effectively divided the right by recruiting the more radical faction of the Partido Popular and helped to unite its antagonists that it loves to caricature: the moderate and radical left, Catalonians, feminists, and centrist voters. Instead of anti-populism reifying populism, the opposite happened. This reversal of the relationship between populism and anti-populism underscores the complexity of this relationship, is an important reminder of the contingent nature of populist politics and calls into question the seemingly intractable global rise in far-right parties.
As Slavoj Žižek argues in a 2019 interview with the New Internationalist, the rise of the populist right across liberal democracies may not necessarily mark the demise of the left. Rather, it may also paradoxically enact the necessary dislocation of ‘the political’ to make way for the left’s reinvigoration. In other words, the rise of the populist right has renewed popular engagement with politics itself. The putative anti-establishment appeal of populist parties emerged from a widespread disillusionment with the liberal centre, but in dislocating that centre, Vox paradoxically reactivated participation more broadly. From record voter turnouts and popular protests to the growth of new political movements and increased involvement by younger generations across the ideological spectrum, Žižek highlights a ‘desperate optimism’ that is rather reminiscent of Auster’s ‘intelligent pessimism.’
Indeed, if we accept Laclau’s strictly formalist definition of populism as a discursive intervention which dislocates the status quo, there is reason to think Vox may not benefit from such dislocations. In this case, these dislocations may have paradoxically opened up new space for the very same broad coalition of progressive and so-called woke politics Vox campaigned against. This paradox may also hold true for other democracies where right-wing populism is gaining ground. In the United States, Donald Trump’s 2020 loss reflected similar mobilisation on the part of Joe Biden, whilst Trump’s incendiary second term is now causing unexpected backlash in historic Republican strongholds. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s 2022 victory over Marine Le Pen relied on Macron’s framing of the National Rally as a threat to republican values. Trump’s 2024 win is reported to have played a significant role in the unexpected comeback victory of Canada’s Liberal Party under Mark Carney and Labor’s Anthony Albanese in Australia. In the United Kingdom, transnational backlash against the US-led populist right is feeding a growing online movement in favour of addressing accelerating wealth inequality.
Spain’s 2019 and 2023 election results may not be reason enough for sustained optimism in today’s uncertain and crisis-ridden political climate. Yet the example of Vox demonstrates how, on occasion, pockets of progressive coalitional politics can unexpectedly emerge strengthened in opposition to a surge in right-wing populism. By leveraging anti-populist backlash into broad coalitional support for progressive politics, the left may occasionally transform moments of crisis into opportunities for socialist reinvigoration. As the far-right tests European democracies, Spain reminds us that no trend – however alarming – is immutable. Indeed, nothing is ever always.