Spain’s angry young men turn to the radical right
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Bullfighting was once the ultimate culture war issue for Spain’s radical rightwing Vox party and some of its older voters — a chance to defend the sanctity of tradition, spar with “woke” animal rights activists and cheer as the nation’s top matador dedicated his final bull to Vox leader Santiago Abascal.
But now that the populist, anti-immigration party is surging in the polls thanks to the support of young Spanish men, Vox leaders have found that old-school conservative preoccupations such as bullfighting have lost much of their importance.
Instead, Vox has learnt to exploit men’s deep-seated economic and social grievances, which have become the defining feature of a new strain of Spanish populism.
“I never liked politics, but I started to vote when I saw the state of the country,” said Vox supporter Adrián Domingo, 30, a metals salesman drinking beer with friends in Teruel, Aragón, near the town’s landmark bull statuette. “It’s a shambles.”
Young women still lean to the left, but there has been a striking shift among males: they identify as being more rightwing than any other cohort of young men in the past 40 years.
Many see themselves as victims of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his policies on the economy and immigration.
While Sánchez celebrates Spain growing faster than any other major advanced economy in the past two years, young men complain that their personal hopes have been frustrated. Stoking their discontent are a band of populist rap artists and far-right podcasters and influencers.
Hermann Tertsch, a Vox member of the European parliament, told the FT: “Young people nowadays see the abyss that exists between reality and the official narrative. It’s an absolute insult.”
Domingo and his two drinking buddies have resentments aplenty: the soaring cost of housing; illegal immigration that they blame for rising crime; degraded public services; “feminist” laws that they say put women’s rights above men’s; and corruption, including allegations against Sánchez’s wife and two former right-hand men in his Socialist party PSOE (who all deny wrongdoing).
If a national election were held today, Vox — which voices exactly these concerns — would win more votes than any other party among men aged 18 to 34, according to CIS, Spain’s public pollster.
As for bullfighting, Domingo said he is a fan but cares more about it as a livelihood issue than a matter of culture. “A big part of Spain lives off livestock farming,” he said. “If you cut that off what happens? You make even more people poorer. I can understand that some people don’t like the bull getting killed. But the bull puts food on the table.”
His friend Francisco Royo, 31, who works for a moving company in Teruel, a remote town, said he paid little attention to politics previously. “But they’re just so bad in the Socialist party that, little by little, I’m getting more interested in screwing them over.”
Voting for Vox is the way to do that — and to surf a populist wave that is headed by US President Donald Trump and washing all over Europe. “We are part of a global cultural and political movement,” Tertsch said.
One of the movement’s leitmotifs is a hardline stance on immigration, which chimes with the views of Jorge Montero, 23, a Vox-voting student from an affluent neighbourhood of Barcelona.
He is troubled by a rise in immigrants “who don’t like our culture or are not able to get used to that culture”. He decries criminals in police custody whose “names are not Spanish” and endorses Vox’s call for tougher border controls and deportations. “It’s not a matter of being racist. It’s that you’re not complying with my laws,” Montero said.
Vox was founded in 2013 by defectors from the People’s party (PP), Spain’s mainstream conservative force, and its original supporters were well-off, Barbour-wearing urbanites and “young guys baling hay in the countryside”, as a party official put it. However, in the past year it has started winning over working-class men who would once have been on the left.
Since last December, Vox has won its largest vote shares on record in three regional elections, capturing 17 per cent across all age groups in Extremadura, 18 per cent in Aragón and, last Sunday, 19 per cent in Castilla y León.
The figures are short of those of its ideological cousins elsewhere: Reform UK is topping the polls on 26 per cent, the Rassemblement National in France is leading on 34 per cent, and Germany’s Alternative for Germany is on 24 per cent, according to Politico’s Poll of Polls. But the discontent of young men is giving Vox momentum.
Rubén Díez, a sociology professor at the Complutense university in Madrid, said: “There is a sense of malaise that is not only economic. It’s also emotional. That pushes people towards more radical views. They think that institutions and democracy are not working for them.”
Vox is in third place in the polls and unlikely to win the next general election due by August 2027. But if Sánchez loses, as today’s polls suggest, Vox will probably be the kingmaker that decides whether to help the PP reach a governing majority by forming a rightwing bloc.
Sánchez portrays Vox as a hateful threat to democratic values. When he led western opposition to the US-Israeli war against Iran last week, Abascal accused him of siding with “tyrannical ayatollahs” and jeopardising economic ties with the US. Sánchez replied that Vox was supporting “those who are setting the world ablaze then complaining about the smoke”.
A decade ago Spain’s politics were the other way around: the PP was running a corruption-riddled centre-right government, unemployment was more than 20 per cent and the political insurgents were radical leftists.
Pablo Iglesias led those leftists as the founder of Podemos, a party that is now on the margins. Vox today, he said, is part of the broader “fascist-isation of the right”. But the right is winning, he acknowledged, because it has adapted to the new rules of the game.
“In societies as media-saturated as ours, politics is an ideological struggle,” Iglesias said. “It’s to do with what is said and repeated on television and on social media. In this the far right has been absolutely masterful. It understands that what matters is the art of dominating emotions.”
The stars of rightwing populism online include Angie Corine, a rapper whose videos conflate opposition to Sánchez with flag-carrying patriotism, and ‘El Jincho’, a tattooed rap artist whose “Sánchez the dog” tune this month bore the premier’s insulting nickname and pilloried him over corruption.
There are podcasters such as Víctor Domínguez, known as Wall Street Wolverine, whose shows mix dismay over Muslim immigration with investment tips, and Daniel Esteve, a social media personality and entrepreneur who has evicted thousands of squatters and rails against Sánchez for cosseting them. Vito Quiles, a journalist who orchestrates impromptu confrontations with politicians and their supporters, is especially popular with young men.
Social media has also hosted bouts of nostalgia for the dictator Francisco Franco, although the sentiment is purely vicarious for those born long after he died 50 years ago. Memes suggest the economy was stronger and the streets were safer under the autocrat — doubtful assertions that also ignored his trampling of political freedoms and human rights.
Vox politicians bristle at the mention of the dictator. “It’s like saying that Reform voters are fans of Oswald Mosley,” said one, referring to the 1930s leader of Britain’s fascist party.
However, the popularity of Franco memes reflects something deeper, said Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos. “Surveys show a rise in the number of young people who believe that an authoritarian system can sometimes be better than a democratic one.”
Economic grievances remain crucial to Vox’s success. Although Spain’s jobless rate is below 10 per cent for the first time in 18 years, young people are angry that wages are stagnating while housing costs leap.
Adrián García, 20, a business student at a university campus in Teruel, said: “I can see that I’ll be working in two years and I still won’t be able to buy a house. I won’t be able to have children because I won’t be able to support them. For me, those things are fundamental.”
He is backing Vox, hoping that its pledges to slash “abusive” taxes and public sector waste will avert that bleak future. Its love of bullfighting, which he considers “unethical”, is incidental.
Last year, when the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla dedicated his last kill to Vox leader Abascal, he told him: “Thank you for everything you do for us.”
Under the gaze of the bull statue in Teruel, Domingo is not grateful just yet. “We’ll have to see how Vox gets on. But we’ve got to give them a chance,” he said. His friend Royo added: “They couldn’t do any worse than what we have now.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela in Madrid
Data visualisation by Alan Smith and Martin Stabe
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