Rewriting history beyond recognition is not a Vox invention. The ultra political party picks up the conservative historical tradition of the late 19th century, when the last colonies of that empire became independent from Spain and historians reconstructed a glorious past to heal the wounds of defeat. It is easy to find Vox’s speeches in those nineteenth-century recreations, which were rescued a few years later by the Franco regime. But in its historical fictions, the far-right party does not claim referent historians of the dictatorship. The speech focuses on the recovery of history as it was “before”. Before democracy, it is understood.
Vox remains with the culture that the PP disdains
Further
This is the main conclusion of the essay Vox facing history, published by Akal, which includes 13 articles by as many researchers who review how those of Santiago Abascal use history as a political program to cast a story with which to convince their voters, fed up with the “cowardly right”. The story is “at the epicenter of the project to envelop the nation with a sacred aura,” says historian Jesús Casquete, editor and coordinator of the essay. The novelty in the historicist movement of the ultra party, how much Casquete, is that his efforts to whitewash the “dirty pasts” -in the expression of José Álvarez Junco- happen to build the left as the “anti-Spain”.
“Critical interpretations of the history of Spain that bring to light episodes of perpetrators and victims are, by definition, ‘anti-Spanish,’” points out Jesús Casquete. The Spanish radical right, unlike the rest of the European fascist emergencies, has risen up without an economic program but with a rereading of history against the critical reviews of the past. It is a cultural reaction that vindicates the positive value of historical facts, “linked to the preservation of a national pride that is in question,” says Mateo Ballester Rodríguez, who writes the chapter History and culture war in Vox.
The reconquest of history
“Vox fully participates in this tendency to appeal to history as an instrument of political struggle and ideological affirmation,” says the historian. The extreme right plays the perpetrator of betrayal of tradition, whose effect, they alarm, is the dissolution of national identities. For Vox, the Spanish left hates Spain –self hate– because it does not defend an immaculate history against the “black legends”. Vox wants something more than the Government, it aspires to establish a cultural hegemony.
The political party presents itself as the repairer of history. Also like the “reconquerors of Spain”, like when Abascal appeared on the balcony disguised with a morion (the helmet of the Spanish Tercios that invaded America). Vox wants to be the party that rescues “a vision of the history of Spain that it considers unfairly abandoned,” says Ballester Rodríguez. The ultra party considers that the left has attacked national pride and stands up to defend the dignity of history. A story that never happened.
They answer historical science with “an epic and glorious tale.” It is what they say that Spanish society needs “and it has been stolen.” As Ballester points out, it is a historical discourse “largely abandoned and academically discredited”. They delve into a remote past and “fill it” with “epic deeds”, explains the historian. They start from the so-called reconquest to continue with the imperial Spain of the Habsburgs and the conquest or colonization of America. They are his favorite chapters, the episodes of a country without stain, of an inevitable pride, of an “extraordinary epic”.
paparazzi of history
Who writes this story to Santiago Abascal to the point? Mateo Ballester Rodríguez says that Vox “supports its historical vision based on a list of current reference authors, several of them organically linked to the party and who are generally not historians by profession.” This became clear in October 2022, when Vox set up what they called The story we made togetherwhere a grandfather opened a history book to his grandson and read the first chapter: “Everything begins at the beginning of the 8th century, in the battle of Covadonga”.
And then “the glorious vision of struggle and victory against external enemies and universal expansion of the nation,” says the historian Ballester Rodríguez. “In the historical account of Vox, the Middle Ages and the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs and the Habsburgs are the main suppliers of symbols and references. The appeal to a liberal Spanish tradition is practically absent ”, he sentences.
a racist costume
The historian Alejandro García Sanjuán is in charge of remembering the falsehood of the so-called Reconquista and denouncing how Vox has the support of a part of the Spanish academic world to set up its alternative story. Although none of them wanted to get involved publicly. In fact, in October 2021 they published an anonymous “report” prepared at the Disenso Foundation, “a text of just over twenty pages long full of clichés and prejudices that reveals severe historiographic indigence,” writes García Sanjuán.
The Catholic Monarchs, as explained by Ana Isabel Carrasco Manchado, are mobilized by Vox “against anyone who does not share or behave according to their ideology.” They use Isabel la Católica to actively fight against the right to abortion, says Carrasco Manchado, the advances of feminism and LGTBIQ + rights. “The history of Spain in Vox propaganda is written with racist, militarized and androcentric rhetoric, like the one liked in the reactionary circles of the 1930s,” says the historian who speaks of a new version of “ideological crusade ”.
José María Portillo indicates that Vox uses history to raise canons that are like corrals that Spaniards should not abandon: binary gender, Christian religion, heterosexual family, single (Spanish) nation. And they use the recreation of the past to justify the exclusion of the present. The canon that defines the “good Spaniard” “allows us to very clearly establish the boundaries of the national community and relentlessly point to the excluded,” says Portillo: “Irregular immigrants, LGTBIQ+ people, non-Spanish nationalists, feminists, federalists, and reds in general. It is important to keep in mind that it is not a question of confronting them ideologically, but of considering them as strangers to the Spanish nation and, therefore, as perfectly expendable subjects for it, ”he says.
And so we come to the origin of all the stories of this party: Covadonga. Abascal has said that “given to choose symbolic places, in Vox we would opt for Covadonga.” For the Vox leader, “constitutional Cádiz is fine, but it is time for reconquests,” he wrote in a 2015 article in Libertad Digital. As Juan Luis Simal points out in the chapter Before Covadonga than Cádiz: Vox and the liberalism of the 19th century, This vision of Spain’s past practiced by the ultra party is a declaration of the “country project that wants to project into the future.”
