It is likely that most of the 600,000 voters VOX lost—compared to 2019—simply moved to the PP, considering it the safer option to get the PSOE out of government. Perhaps, however, some abstained, and to these we must add the many potential voters that were never courted.
VOX has failed to run a politically transversal campaign.
The party hasn’t emphasized its potential appeal to voters on the old Left, longing for a working-class politics rather than the postmodern assortment of sexual and other identities that now constitute the mainstream Left’s discourse.
This is partly because VOX can come across as ideologically ambiguous. It would be most consistent if the party treated economic liberalism as a means, not an end, but this is not always clear from its messaging and associations. Inviting Javier Milei to the VIVA22 event, for example, is at stark odds with the line represented by Buxade. I’ve several times heard people remark that VOX has two hearts, by which they mean roughly libertarian, quasi-anarcho-capitalism vs. patriotic statism with economically liberal characteristics (I discuss this here.)
VOX sometimes gives the impression of having more or less accepted the liberal, right-wing position that ‘culture war’ issues are a distraction, thereby forfeiting an arena that might have won it votes from Spaniards who otherwise abstain from elections.
Immigration is likewise not quite the policy pillar it once seemed to be for VOX. The civil discord in France, the fruit of mass migration and the difficulties of integration, for example, was barely utilized as a warning of things to come by Abascal’s party.
So far as natalism is concerned, while policies to raise the birth rate are central to VOX’s platform, its leaders also constantly emphasize the idea that Spain can deal with its low fertility by drawing on Central and South American immigration. The reality is that Latin American immigration has brought serious gang violence to Spain’s cities, is not as culturally assimilable as is claimed, and for the most part seems to vote for the Left, not the Right.
VOX’s messaging is in need of both medium and long-term strategy: both appealing to concerns other parties have abandoned (such as those of old school, working-class focused leftists, or of strict Catholics who don’t vote their conscience because they haven’t been properly confronted), and cultivating future voters by introducing new concerns into the public sphere.
Ideas can be introduced, promoted, and built up until they mobilize voter blocks. We may reflect, for example, on the fact that the political mythologies which now hold sway in Catalonia and the Basque Country are only about a century and a half old. Indeed, appeals to assorted gender identities made by the PSOE or Sumar are even newer.
A storefront does not merely present shoppers with goods matching their pre-existing desires. Rather, it displays objects a potential buyer was unaware of, and so contributes to the shaping of desire. The same is true of politics.
Ideas, good and bad, can be planted and cultivated, just as surely as they can atrophy or be uprooted. Of course, some ideas are weeds, others fruit-bearing trees—but contrary to what the liberals in the party may think, an orchard needs more, not less, tending to than the field of weeds. Good ideas don’t necessarily spread on their own (pace the pseudo-liberal quietists that make up the Spanish Right).
The suggestion that VOX should be more, rather than less, ideologically distinct, may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t it precisely by painting VOX as a party mired in the culture war that the PSOE has managed to get ahead? But we may suggest that leaning into these attacks would have been precisely the right card to play.
For example, the full, graphic, traumatic force of state-funded ‘gender transition’ surgeries for minors should have been deployed to run interference against the government’s absurd narrative that the Right was readying itself to unleash violence on ‘non-binary’ people.
In the Basque Country, aggressive campaigns against Bildu featuring photographs of the small children blown to pieces by the ETA because their parents weren’t separatists (or happened to take a walk next to the wrong car bomb that day), would have been a good start as well.
If the media is against you, give them a campaign they can’t ignore—gnaw at their complacency.
Lifelong infertility delivered on prepubescent children for the sake of ‘gender affirmation;’ mass abortion mills; the memory of separatist terrorism; increasing rape and murder rates on account of an open border—these and other morbid signs of civilizational collapse afford VOX plenty of opportunities to interfere with polite political discourse and plant seeds in the conscience of future voters.
But the grind of electoral politics tends to suck people into short-term thinking, so it is likely that strategists will go chasing after the ever-evanescent political center in order to reap what votes they can, while the sowing of ideas through institutions is left to the Left, which is well funded and has plenty of foreign backers.
Granted, the poor showing is not all the party’s fault. VOX barely has any favorable television or newspaper outlets. Even once-friendly media platforms, like the popular radio personality Jimenez Losantos, have taken to spreading disinformation about the party to their center-Right audience (such as the idea that VOX has purged its liberals, as though VOX were not far more economically liberal than the PP).
But even without such ‘friendly’ interference, the party’s rhetoric and talking points were not properly calibrated to make a real impact in a climate of hegemonic, pro-government media.
After decades of a culture war in which only one side has been fighting, and in which only one side has built up partisan mass media, it is no wonder that rallies and interviews are not enough to offset things.
Abascal’s remarks on his party’s failure to garner more votes emphasized media manipulation and the PP’s hostile campaign as causing the party’s underperformance.
A true, but all too partial, diagnostic.
