Vox Has a Taste of Power.

The debate regarding the ‘cordón sanitario’ – the Partido Popular’s insistence on keeping at arm’s length the ultra-right Vox party, seems to have broken. Curiously, not under the leadership of Pablo Casado, but rather his more ‘moderate’ successor Núñez Feijóo.

Alfonso F Mañueco, the PP candidate for the regional Castilla y León presidency announced last Thursday – ‘We have arrived at an agreement with Vox which will permit a stable and solid government respecting constitutional order and the autonomous statutes of Castilla y León’. The deal is the vice-presidency for the region with the Vox candidate Juan García-Gallardo, plus three departments and the regional house-speaker. In practice – it was Vox taking over the chairs left by Ciudadanos.

This is the first time that Vox has obtained power in government. Not everyone is impressed, although ECD readers give it 92% in favour.

Público and other media was asking Mañueco about his agreement, and how far would he accept and observe the Vox main demands (gender violence, immigration and Francoist crimes are all no-noes for the Voxxers).  

‘You have no idea what you just signed’, they told him as he danced around their questions.

The only other alternative for Mañueco had been the vague idea suggested by Feijóo of the PSOE abstaining and allowing him to run a minority government (with the blessing of the PSOE, who have little reason to reach out to the PP).

From El País we read that Vox no longer rests on its rhetoric, it can now show in practice its aims; which, for all that the regional president must squirm on his hook, will be in evidence from the start.  Here are some of the more extraordinary Vox ideas:

All other parties from the PP downwards are members of the leftie-alliance “consenso progre”; climate change is a false dogma; the nation-state is the only viable system, Vox is an enemy of international political unions and regional governments alike; immigration “one needs Spanish blood, not Spanish papers”; gender violence is unfair to men; Gays love the Spanish flag (but only man/woman relationships are natural). The party is also against separatists, euthanasia and abortion. A quote from the Vox national deputy Ángel López Maraver on the subject of Cultura is worth repeating: “The Government only takes care of their well-paid goons who produce ideological propaganda on the television, on social networks and in the cinema with unwatchable clunkers (…). If the Government really wants a clear example of what culture is, then they have, among others, the art of bullfighting”.

Which brings us to:

The only way that ‘the moderate’ Alberto Núñez Feijóo could ever become president of Spain in these times of post two-party politics and healthy party majorities would be if his vice-president was Santiago Abascal and fascism had once again become mainstream. Thus, PP voters must be aware of what they will be asking for.