VOX (Spain)

With Santiago Abascal, Francoism returns through the erasure of memory.

His party, Vox, doesn't directly claim to represent Francisco Franco's dictatorship. It goes further, challenging the very framework that condemns it. The laws on democratic memory are deemed "sectarian." Exhuming mass graves would "reopen old wounds." The institutional condemnation of Francoism would become "ideological persecution." The past should no longer be judged, but rather relativized before it can be mobilized.

The rest of the program follows the same logic, including: national preference disguised as legalism, authoritarian recentralization of the state, feminism equated with a "gender ideology" to be combated, with specific laws to be repealed, and of course, historical memory to be neutralized in the name of national unity. The adversary comes from within: separatists, "globalists," progressive elites...

Order, authority, and national homogeneity are rehabilitated in a questioning of everything that since 1978 has built the democratic consensus around the rejection of Francoism.