The Vox leaders have welcomed ‘Se fin de Fiesta’ (SALF), the group founded by the ultra agitator Alvise Pérez. After their success in the European elections, in which the spreader of hoaxes obtained three seats, the main leaders of Santiago Abascal’s party extended their hand to them and assured that if Alvise Pérez and the other two MEPs elected from the new political group decide to register in the European Parliament in the group of Conservatives and Reformists, where they and the Italian Georgia Meloni, among other leaders of the extreme right, are, will receive them with “a hug.”
In their first statements, those of Abascal made an effort to minimize the emergence of the ultra agitator on the political board and attributed their indisputable success in the recent elections to the citizens’ “fatigue” with the Government of Pedro Sánchez, with his partners and also with the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whom they consider “a scammer.”
Once the electoral hangover is over, in Bambú – the Madrid street where Vox’s headquarters is located – the alarms have gone off about the danger posed by a new competitor in the same electoral space and they have decided to raise the tone against the Government and redouble the use of social networks as a propaganda tool in the purest style of the “analyst and consultant”, as Alvise presents himself.
Although all parties use social networks as a propaganda vehicle, especially Telegram, Abascal’s party has always published news – often hoaxes – through his main newspaper, La Gaceta de la Biosfera, which he launches on Telegram and on X along with his proclamations against immigration, one of the favorite targets. of the. But now, given the success of SALF, those responsible for communications at Vox have decided to also redouble their activity on networks.
In fact, from the European elections, in which they did not manage to double their seats as they had proposed, they do not stop uploading videos with shocking images of young people attacking passers-by, making fights or in obscene attitudes.
The far-right party has also intensified propaganda on all its channels about the activities of its deputies and public officials, with summaries of interviews with the main leaders of the party while criticizing their political rivals. The competition is palpable and evident, to the point that those from Abascal have copied Alvise’s format and now add a daily summary with “the most outstanding news from Vox”, in the image and likeness of “the real news” that so much Ultra agitators like Vox say that they “hide the media,” and that sometimes they are unverified ‘fake news’.
Vox is planted in the house of Pedro Sánchez’s brother
Vox has now also found it inappropriate to appear as a private prosecutor in the cases opened against the wife of Pedro Sánchez, Begoña Gómez and David Sánchez, brother of the President of the Government. And a few days ago they sent the Extremaduran senator and deputy, Ángel Pelayo, and his partner Marta Castro, to the latter’s home in Elvas (Portugal) to denounce his alleged “corruption.” The Vox leaders speak in situ about the purchase by David Sánchez of “a stately home in the best area” of the city, while pointing out a house behind him in which luxury is nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, the saturation of messages from the founder of SALF is such that a day there can be hundreds of notifications from Alvise about all kinds of things: from “investigations” that the ‘analyst’ has done on certain politicians or related people, to surveys or simple reflections that he leaves on the network about the current events of the day. There is also no shortage of attacks on the media, which, like Vox, he accuses of wanting to silence him and of being at the service of “power” and “sanchismo.”
Communication experts consulted by this editorial team agree in recognizing Alvise’s success in having managed to attract close to a million voters in such a short time, without a party behind it, as Vox has, and without an electoral program, using mainly its Telegram channel. which has nearly 600,000 subscribers while on Instagram and TikTok it has almost 200,000 followers each and more than 35,000 on X’s SALF profile. The leader of the voters’ platform himself boasted of his feat on the same election night : “Without resources, without any coverage and with total contempt and discredit on the part of politicians and the media, we have achieved a historic result for a handful of free citizens.”
The importance of networks
For Carlos del Castillo, technology expert at elDiario.es, “for a phenomenon like Alvise’s, social networks can be as important or more than the coverage of a media outlet, because they allow a direct relationship with followers, who in The bottom line is the dream of any politician, that their messages arrive without filters.” Del Castillo believes that “having a strong social media strategy is not that it is important, it is that it is key for parties like Vox that base their discourse on lying or distorting data.”
Verónica Fumanal, political analyst and specialist in communication and leadership, remembers that since “the institutional birth of Vox, Alvise had been a journalist related to the Vox regime, not as its spokesperson but as an alternative means of dissemination within what was They call spheres related to the extreme right that are generated outside the traditional media.” “And that,” says Fumanal, “is usually done through alternative websites or even alternative social networks,” as did Donald Trump, who “created his own Twitter before Elon Musk bought it.”
The political analyst adds that “in the United States, a whole series of ecosystems of people, whether journalists or not, have been generated who have generated their own content platforms in which defamations, hoaxes and insults are generated that are very outside the media.” traditional and serious communication.
In his opinion, Alvise “also emerges from that ecosystem here” and “becomes independent of the parent company, which is Vox, when it already has a very broad social base of more than 500,000 subscribers on Telegram and as many followers on Instagram, people who are potential voters.” “By verifying that it has an electoral niche, it is when it launches a candidacy, a group of voters to attend the European elections in which it is cheaper to obtain a deputy as it is a single constituency.”
Fumanal gives as an example the fact that he now announces that “he is not going to receive a salary nor will he have an official car, as if the MEPs had an official car. But it doesn’t matter because he has grown up in the hoax and, therefore, everything about him is going to be a hoax. And there are people willing to believe him,” he says.
For his part, David Álvarez Sabalegui, social media analyst and consultant, also believes that one of the main reasons for Alvise’s ‘success’ is that “the focus it gives to social media is not just as dissemination tools.” “The differentiating factor in his case is that he uses his digital profiles, mainly Telegram, as strategic elements in terms of mobilization,” and that “among his more than 500,000 subscribers to his channel, he has managed to convert many of them into activists. It is its substitute for what would become a political organization if what we are talking about is mobilizing.”
To the question of what dangers this massive use of networks entails, Álvarez Sabalegui answers that “the dangers are the same as the advantages or virtues. That is, the technical use of networks is merely instrumental. In the political scenario we talk about communicating (with content dissemination strategies and interaction with communities of followers), and we talk about mobilizing (working with communities to convert part of them into activists),” he concludes.
All of this can be used to implement good practices, healthy for society in general, or to implement strategies for disseminating disinformation content, for example.
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