A year ago, the far right hadn't had a single seat in the Spanish Congress since the restoration of democracy after Franco. In April, Vox won it's first 24 seats; after November, it now has 52, and it's seizing the opportunity to bring its extremist rhetoric into the chamber. Without a hair going out of place, Santiago Abascal today claimed the investiture of Pedro Sánchez's left-wing coalition government was an "institutional coup".
The party's leader started his short speech today referring to a murder yesterday in Esplugues, in which a young man killed his partner and their young daughter. He used the case to repeat Vox's attacks on the various attempts in Spain to tackle gender-based violence, saying: "In Vox we are concerned about all victims, independent of sex and the perpetrator."
He then listed a series of crimes he said had taken place in Spain this year, committed by non-Spaniards, saying that "for others, the victims are only important when the perpetrator is a man and Spanish". "There has not been a single second [during the investiture debate] used to denounce the plague of gang rapes which have been committed in the first days of this year and committed, fundamentally, by foreigners," he claimed.
He also found time to bring up Catalonia, saying "the convicted criminal, the rebel [Catalan president] Torra has still not been arrested or removed from office. The government continues to look the other way because today it needs the permission of the coup plotters." In that, the far-right leader was referring to the abstention of pro-independence party ERC, mathematically necessary for Sánchez to be invested today, following an agreement which Torra and his JxCat has refused to endorse.
Abascal also accused Sánchez of having "used the institutions to win the election" and his coalition partners Podemos of being "communists with close ties to dictatorships, with narco-terrorist figures and with theocracies". The politician also alleged the new government has links with Spanish terrorists: "The company insuring the investiture [...] is called ETA." He said that the delegates don't "deserve" to have taken their seats in the Congress as, he claimed, they have "conspired against it [...] and the Constitution".