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What does Guadiana del Caudillo, a town of 2,500 people in Spain's Badajoz province, have to do with the recent summit held at the Pedralbes palace in Barcelona between Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and Catalan president Quim Torra? At face value, very little; below the surface, a tremendous amount. There is a common thread, a black thread, that connects what has happened in recent years in Guadiana del Caudillo with the document of 21 points that Torra handed to Sánchez to set in motion a negotiation, a dialogue on the future of Catalonia; a document which the Spanish president has flatly rejected.

Guadiana del Caudillo is one of the agricultural colonization towns founded by the Franco regime in the south-western region of Extremadura in the 1950s. Hence the unconstitutional 'surname' the town still bears - the Caudillo, or leader, was the dictator Francisco Franco. The so-called Badajoz Plan was a complete failure of fascist planning that ended up prompting the emigration, to Catalonia among other places, of hundreds of thousands of people. When created, in 1951, the town was part of the municipality of Badajoz, the provincial capital, but in 2009 its scission into a separate municipality was approved. However, the government of Extremadura, in the hands of the Socialists (PSOE), made it a condition that the mention of the Caudillo would be removed from the place name, in accordance with the Law of Historical Memory. What happened? Well, the Guadianeros voted in a referendum... in favour of retaining the full Francoist name to their town. On February 17th, 2012, after the Popular Party (PP) had taken control of the Extremaduran presidency, they finally declared their municipal independence. And on March 11th, the townspeople decided by 60.6% of the votes, 495 in total, to keep the original name. Participation in the referendum was frankly low, at only 32.3%, but this in no way invalidated the result. "Guadiana will continue to belong to the Caudillo," said the digital edition of the ABC newspaper.

A mere anecdote? A remnant of rural Francoism in the depths of Spain, left behind in the 21st century? In reality, it was an unsuspected prelude to the far-right tsunami that has been unleashed in recent months, which has culminated in the emergence of the neofascist Vox party in the Andalusian Parliament. On September 7th, 2018, the PP mayor of Guadiana del Caudillo, Antonio Pozo, and the Extremaduran deputy Juan Antonio Morales, a former PP secretary in Badajoz, announced they were switching to Vox, due to ideological discrepancies with their former party. Santiago Abascal, the "national" leader of Vox, gave the move his blessing at a joint press conference in Mérida. Pozo became the fourth Vox mayor in Spanish territory. The other three villages governed by Vox are Cardeñuela Riopico (Burgos province), Barruelo del Valle (Valladolid) and Navares de las Cuevas (Segovia), where the far right party was elected with an absolute majority in the 2015 municipal elections. 


Translation of Tweet: "Productive meeting yesterday with affiliates in Guadiana del Caudillo. #LivingSpain is growing every day, it can be seen in the street, in the affiliations, in the public acts and soon it will also be noticed in the institutions."— VOX Badajoz, November 22nd 2018 

​From the solitary Blas Piñar, to the 12 deputies of Vox 

The last time a Francoist far-right group with an explicit programme reached a position in a Spanish legislative chamber was way back in the general elections of 1979. The Francoist and ultra-Catholic notary Blas Piñar, founder of the Fuerza Nueva party, won a single seat in Madrid within the Unión Nacional far-right coalition, which won a total of 378,964 votes in Spain as a whole. Piñar was seated in the Spanish Congress on the day of the attempted coup d'état of February 23, 1981, when Civil Guard officer Antonio Tejero entered with a pistol in his hand. In an interview with the Alerta Digital newspaper in 2013 [link in Spanish], Piñar recounted his experience: "I thought it was an attack by ETA terrorists. I was greatly relieved, and I let go of all my fear, when I realized that it was the Civil Guard. Whatever their objective, no serious harm could come to us." Tejero himself advised Piñar to go home, but the far-right MP, a former lawyer in the Franco-era institutions, was more interested in being present for the armed kidnapping of his parliamentary colleagues.

At the elections of 1982, won in a landslide by Felipe González's PSOE, Fuerza Nueva lost its place in the Spanish parliament: the party won only 108,746 votes. Manuel Fraga's People's Alliance (AP) became the party of refuge for almost all of the Francoist vote, from the most modernizing tendencies through to those who opposed the new constitutional regime.

For decades, it seemed that nobody really knew where the extreme right was in Spain - although many imagined where it might be - in contrast to the emergence of the phenomenon all over Europe. The burden of the Franco dictatorship was too weighty, political scientists and experts argued: the past was a bad electoral brand. Nevertheless, something was moving. It was not in the marginal space of the far-right groups - who certainly existed and were active - but rather, in the shadow of a mainstream party, the PP, heir to the AP, infested with corruption and in the hands of the leadership of Mariano Rajoy, labelled as weak in his response to the Catalan independence "challenge", as it was described day-in and day-out by far-right radio preacher Federico Jiménez Losantos.

Abascal San Gil Vidal Quadras 2013 EFE

Abascal, San Gil and Vidal-Quadras in San Sebastián, in 2013, at the presentation of the Foundation for the Defence of the Spanish Nation (DENAES) / Juan Herrero / EFE

The warning sign from Vidal-Quadras

In the European elections of May 2014, the former Catalonia PP leader and ex-vice president of the European Parliament, Aleix Vidal-Quadras, headed the candidature for the newly created party Vox - nothing to do with the popular dictionary brand or the German television network - to the European Parliament, and won 246,833 votes, a mere 1.87% of the total. It was left outside the EU assembly but it planted a warning flag for the future. Those same elections saw the emergence of the left-wing Podemos led by Pablo Iglesias, which won five seats.

In spite of the initial failure in Europe, Vox did not abandon the options of continent-wide politics. In February 2017, the party participated in a summit of the so-called "Euroskeptic European right" in Koblenz, Germany, headed by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the successor party to France's Front National. Although Rajoy's declining PP still seemed to resist the push, the fog was starting to lift on the old question of where the Spanish ultra-right was hiding. Or, better said, where it would run out from. And it all became totally clear on December 2nd 2018, when Vox broke into the Andalusian Parliament with 395,000 votes, 10.97% of the total, and 12 deputies, with an ultra-conservative, sexist and, of course, xenophobic programme: above all, it obtained its best results in municipalities with strong African immigration such as El Ejido, in Almeria, where in the year 2000 the PP's José María Aznar had prevailed with a hardline campaign that gave him an absolute majority in Spain.

Of course, Vox's line in the Andalusian elections was also a fiercely Spanish ethno-nationalist and anti-Catalan independence programme. But not just that. The fact that the party led by Santiago Abascal, former leader of the PP in the Basque Country, son of a PP politician threatened by ETA, supported for many years by the most intense strand of the party exemplified by Esperanza Aguirre and Aznar himself, has also been conducting a private prosecution in the case against the Catalan independence leaders ended up giving electoral reinforcement to the renewed neo-Francoist offer of the Spanish right. 

With Vox, the far right has achieved its best electoral result so far. Spanish Trumpism now has its own brand. If the Podemos slogan Sí se puede (Yes we can) had crystallised a powerful alternative left offer, then A por ellos (Go get 'em) - in which the "them" refers to pro-independence Catalans - has done the same thing as a call to the extreme right. When the king of Spain, Felipe VI, defended the brutal repression of independence in his speech on October 3rd, 2017 - "It is the responsibility of the legitimate powers of the state to guarantee the constitutional order" - it also helped to break the taboo against voting openly and proudly for a (neo-)Francoist party. The blessing of the Andalusian voters and the alliance with the PP and Ciudadanos (Cs) to remove the long-governing PSOE from regional power has now enabled Vox to exploit the system and set the political and media agenda: the party has moved in and made itself at home.

 

Vox campaign spot: "The Reconquista will begin in Andalusian lands."

On October 7th, Vox held a major meeting in a Podemos stronghold - in Madrid, at the Vistalegre palace. But all the polls prior to the Andalusian elections predicted that Vox would barely enter the Andalusian Parliament. They were wrong until the last moment. Only one survey, that by AD-3 for ABC published on election night itself, got close, giving the far-right party 8 to 10 seats. Possibly what Elisabeth Noelle-Newmann identified as the spiral of silence applied: a very significant proportion of right-wing voters, but also of those on the left, kept quiet until the last moment about how they intended to mark their ballot papers, for whom they would vote: for Franco.

The polls had failed to judge the effect of Mariano Rajoy's eviction from power, following Pedro Sánchez's no confidence motion, which was ultimately successful thanks to the vote of the Catalan independence parties, ERC and PDeCAT. On the other hand, the new PP leader, Pablo Casado, along with his Ciudadanos twin, Albert Rivera, did have an intuition of what was going on as they set off on a head-to-head race of populist radicalization in their messages, trying to avoid leakage from their own parties and each trying to attract the extreme flank of the broader electorate for themselves. But finally, the authentic "Podemos of the right", Vox, rode in on horseback, as shown in its electoral spots, and wielding a gun too (Abascal boasts of bearing arms) to start a new "Reconquista" - not at Covadonga, where the medieval Spanish 'reconquest' of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors supposedly began, but in the marshes of the river Guadalquivir and the deserts of Almeria. That is to say, in the Iberian south, the opposite corner to Don Pelayo's victory 1,000 years ago, and in the same corner as Franco's, considerably more recently.


"After 36 years of stagnation, clientelism and corruption, a new time of hope for Andalusia and promising possibilities for the whole of Spain is opening. Andalusian voters have shown the path for the rest of Spain to follow. A great night."—Alejo Vidal-Quadras

On December 2nd, Vidal-Quadras, despite having separated from the Vox project after having been one of its intellectual authors, celebrated it on Twitter and predicted that the phenomenon would end up impacting on the whole Spanish state. On December 28th, the new-born PP-Cs-Vox tripartite imposed its candidate for the position of speaker in the Andalusian Parliament and announced an imminent agreement on the presidency of the Andalusian government after 36 years of uninterrupted PSOE rule. The objective of destroying the electoral stronghold of the PSOE's Susana Díaz meant that the idea of a cordon sanitaire against the far right was not even mentioned. After all, the votes of Vox could only be added to one block of the two that were possible, left and right, and it was the right which had the majority. End of story.

Neither the PP nor Ciudadanos —despite the fact that, in theory, it is problematic for the Cs candidate for Barcelona mayoralty, ​​Manuel Valls— have expressed any doubts about extending the Andalusian alliance with the neo-Francoists throughout the Spanish political scene on the eve of an election year, with municipal elections to be held in May, along with votes for the governments of 13 Autonomous Communities and for the European Parliament. Without discarding the possibility of an early Spanish general election. The operation under way to whitewash Vox includes such murky claims as justifying an alliance with Vox on the basis that the PSOE's current  partners are just as bad: Podemos and, above all, the two Catalan independence parties.


"One of the 21 points that the Catalan government proposed to the government of Spain is the isolation of the extreme right and of fascism, as is practiced in all Europe's democracies. The PP-Cs-VOX pact must be denounced to all European bodies. We commit ourselves to doing so."— Quim Torra

The black thread. The neo-Francoist extreme right no longer just fills institutional positions in Guadiana del Caudillo and three other tiny villages on the map of Spain. It is also seated in the Parliament of Spain's most populated Autonomous Community. Yet the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has told Quim Torra that his 21 points for negotiation, including the "de-Francoization" of Spain and "the isolation of fascism and the far extreme right" are a "monologue" that has nowhere to go.

The trial of the jailed Catalan independence leaders in the Supreme Court will be held in a climate of maximum hostility. Of Francoization. The Spain that already votes - and will vote - for Vox, and a large part of the rest, will be playing the sinister game of the Catalan independence trial wearing the colours of the private prosecution, the accusation being conducted by Vox. Franco, whose remains, despite Sánchez's decision to exhume them, continue to be where they were, (also) accuses. The black thread.

Title photo: Abascal - right - with party officials Ortega and Serrano at a Vox meeting for the Andalusian elections