While campaigning in Castilla y León, a Spanish region poised to hold regional elections on Sunday, February 13th, VOX leader Santiago Abascal took the opportunity to again highlight the country’s demographic crisis and the need to raise Spanish birthrates as a centerpiece of his party’s message to voters. “The youth has been condemned to exile,” he said during a speech to a crowd of supporters:
What the young want is work, a house, the ability to start a family. And they want to have a fatherland. They want the same thing young people have wanted throughout history.
VOX’s program for Castilla y León includes lowering taxes and providing more aid to families. Abascal framed the upcoming regional, as well as national, elections in the context of what he characterized as a decisive epochal question. “Today, we are faced with a great decision,” he declared:
A choice between natalism and immigration … some have chosen immigration, and they’ve chosen to insult you. “You don’t want immigration? You’re a xenophobe.” Well, we choose natalism, we want children to fill the parks, to fill the schools, to be born here and live here.
Abascal added that his party wants to welcome those who arrive legally and respect the local culture.
The speech also emphasized the role played by lax immigration policies in electoral engineering, arguing that those who support mass migration do so hoping to buy the vote of the new arrivals receiving financial aid, and to ensure their party’s place in government. To this, he added that such engineering is also part of an international globalist agenda, which he identified with the UN’s Agenda 2030.
The outcome of these regional elections will be an indication, with a view to the national elections, both of VOX’s ability to mobilize a large enough electorate, and of whether the center-right PP’s anti-VOX rhetoric will actually translate into an attempt to exclude them from government.
