The five splits that (for now) Vox has suffered

Olona herself pointed out the former Secretary General, Javier Ortega Smith, as guilty of this situation, whom Abascal ended up letting fall at the beginning of the month when he verified the growing internal unrest that reigns in the territories a few months before the municipal and regional elections. His position has been occupied by the Catalan leader Ignacio Garriga, very close to Jorge Buxadé and Opus Dei.

On Tuesday, the leader of A Coruña and Vox candidate in the last Galician elections, Ricardo Morado, left the party. Shortly after he announced it on his Twitter profile, Olona gave him his support: “Get up, fight, take blows. But up again. Strength and honor, Ricardo”, he wrote.

Morado’s departure was received coldly by the former secretary general of Vox. “You can go to the PP, go on the Camino de Santiago, you can dedicate yourself to meditation, I have said it many times, but what you should never do is elevate what is an exception to the category of general,” Ortega snapped. Smith to the journalists who asked him about it, in a clear message also addressed to Olona.

Abascal himself also downplayed last week the possibility that the former deputy for Granada would launch her own project, which would add to the far from negligible list of formations born of the internal discontent that is growing in Vox.

TúPatria, the first spin-off of Vox

One of the first formations that emerged promoted by former Vox leaders was TúPatria, which chairs the provincial secretary from Alicante, Carmen Gomis. The party was announced in March 2020 but was presented to society in Madrid in mid-July of that year, defining itself as “economically liberal and socially conservative.” “We are a moderate right, nothing to do with the extremism of Vox,” Gomis assured this newsroom then.

Currently TúPatria has a structure in almost all the provinces of Spain and its leadership figures the number of militants at more than a thousand, mostly from Vox, although members of Ciudadanos and the PP disenchanted with their parties have also joined it.

Values, the party that defends “the traditional family”

The next project that emerged was Values, promoted in Murcia by another former member of Vox, Alfonso Galdón, former president of the Family Forum. It was in December of that same 2020, a few months after Galdón appeared in the primaries to preside over Vox Murcia, losing them against the official candidate, José Ángel Antelo. His candidacy challenged the result before the party’s Electoral Committee, considering that the electoral process was “tainted from the beginning, with multiple irregularities.” In the end, Galdón, after seeing his appeal dismissed, ended up slamming the door on the far-right party, which he accused of “lack of internal democracy.”

Values ​​proclaims the defense of the “traditional family” model and is opposed to homosexual marriage, betting on private property economically, but without dismantling “health and public education.” In May 2018, the Galdón Family Forum, in line with the ultra-Catholics, convinced the Government of Murcia to suspend the talks on sexual-affective diversity. However, the president of this new party insisted when his presentation took place that they differ from Vox “many things, including forms and internal democracy.” “Our ideology is more center-right,” he said.

Former Andalusian leaders of Vox registered Spain Suma

Another of the political projects that emerged that year, in November exactly, a little before Values, was España Suma, promoted by former Andalusian leaders of Vox led by the then far-right party councilor in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), José Manuel Martínez Ayala , who also abandoned militancy due to discrepancies with the management. He was later joined by other Vox positions from other communities dissatisfied with the drift of his old formation. Spain Sum was the brand with which the former president of the PP, Pablo Casado, planned to absorb Ciudadanos for the next elections, but the former leaders of Vox snatched it from him.

The former coordinator of Vox in Terrassa (Barcelona) joined the project, Jesús Rodríguez-Pachón, who was purged by the national leadership alleging “loss of trust” along with other charges considered ‘wayward’. The sudden dismissal of him triggered in Catalonia a rosary of abandonments in solidarity with him. Only in the municipality they quantified the march of 40 affiliates. Rodríguez-Pachón, who chairs the new party in Catalonia, then assured this newsroom that in Abascal’s formation “despotism is practiced. The initial project has not been respected, betraying those of us who showed our faces”, he denounces.

España Suma defines itself as “liberal in the economic field” and has a decalogue of principles: “Regenerate the loss of trust of citizens towards all current political parties. Put an end to their privileges, but really, not only in speeches, with a democratic, transparent and decentralized internal functioning”. In addition, it proposes to modify the law of gender violence by another one of “domestic violence”. “On issues such as abortion or euthanasia we are more liberal, more flexible than Vox, whose extremism leads them to positions that are not logical. We are not from the extreme right”, assured Rodríguez-Pachón.

Together for Spain, the party that admires Blas Piñar, Le Pen and Meloni

As if the Vox spin-offs were not few, then it emerged Together for Spain, which is governed by a Promotional Board led by Andrés Santo, a former Valencian Vox member who defines himself as a “non-practicing Catholic” and says that since 1982 he has been active “in patriotic and Falangist organizations” and was press officer of the Fuerza union. Nacional del Trabajo (FNT), promoted by Blas Piñar while he was president of the fascist party Fuerza Nueva and which advocated the disappearance of the strike and defended free dismissal.

Santo’s party is situated “without any complex” in the most extreme right-wing ideological spectrum. “Together for Spain greets the European national movements and, especially, those led by Marine Le Pen, in France, and Giorgia Meloni, in Italy”. “We also want to express our respect, sympathy and admiration, without any complex for expressing it, to the historical figures of Blas Piñar, Giorgio Almirante and Jean Marie Le Pen, as well as many other European leaders who have guided us patriots throughout of decades of struggle and combat for Spain and for the Europe of the Homelands, against the Europe of the bureaucrats and merchants of the European Union”.

In its ideology, as a program, it demands “to replace in its historical place the figure of the previous head of state, Francisco Franco, as well as that of the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and those of other historical patriots such as the deputy for Renovación Española, José Calvo Sotelo, the founders of the JONS Ramiro Ledesma and Onesimo Redondo, soldiers such as Sanjurjo, Queipo de Llano or Mola, the Falangist lawyer Mercedes Formica, as a promoter of the defense of women’s rights in Spain and , of course, the Blue Division of Spanish volunteers who fought against communism on the Russian front during World War II”.

Free, the last split of Vox

In March of this year, ‘Libres’ was born, a party promoted by Luz Belinda Rodríguez Fernández, who was a Vox deputy in the Andalusian Parliament between 2018 and 2022. The far-right former deputy left Santiago Abascal’s party in January 2020 after denouncing “labor harassment” and ensure that they “spied” her, but she kept the minutes and became unaffiliated, from where she announced that she was going to defend the ideas of the Spanish Falange.

Finally, she set up Libres, recruiting people rebounded from Abascal’s party with the intention of being able to attend the general elections, although she has not yet decided whether the candidacy for the Presidency of the Government will be headed by herself or by another member of the new formation.

In the manifesto with which they were presented, they motivated their appearance in the fact that “many Spaniards feel orphaned by their party, lacking representation”, for which they saw “the need to create a new political project close to them and with them, to obtain a real, transparent and loyal representativeness in the institutions”. In addition, they explain the intentions of the party, lamenting in the first place that “the political forces represented today in Congress and in the rest of Spanish institutions are insensitive to the state of need suffered by a large majority of Spaniards.” That’s why they say that ‘Libres’ arrives “to solve those small problems that every day keep so many Spaniards awake at night” and that “if they are not dealt with in time, they become big concerns”.

Like almost all new projects, that of Luz Belinda Rodríguez promises to promote “a democratic regeneration that recovers the confidence and illusion of citizens in their institutions. For that, it is essential to guarantee not only the separation of powers, but especially the balance that characterizes a State of Social Justice, Democratic and Rule of Law”, they affirm.

VoxHabla, a current that did not materialize as a party

The one that did not establish itself as a party was the critical current VoxHabla, promoted by Carmelo González, the affiliate of the extreme right-wing party of the Canary Islands who was abruptly dismissed as head of communication in the province of Las Palmas after announcing that he was going to compete against Santiago. Abascal for the presidency of the party in the last national assembly.

Precisely one of the former leaders who supported this current, Fernando Moya, former coordinator and spokesperson for Vox in Barcelona, ​​appeared last Sunday on the program ‘Salvados’, on La Sexta, denouncing the ways and means of acting of the leadership of the formation of extreme right. As he revealed, neo-Nazis are active in Vox. And the party leadership advised the officials from Catalonia who carried weapons, just as Abascal himself does, as he himself has acknowledged.