'They tell the truth’: Spanish town where 34.5% voted for far-right Vox

The barman glanced up at the sky over Ocaña’s elegant main square before dragging a couple of tables outside. Like much else in Spain, the recent weather could charitably be described as changeable.

On Sunday, the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) won the country’s fourth general election in as many years, the far-right Vox stormed into third place, and the Citizens party – once touted as the future of the Spanish centre ground – collapsed into an ignominious heap.

Fewer than 48 hours later, the PSOE and the anti-austerity Podemos announced the preliminary coalition deal that had proved so elusive after the Socialists won the last election in April but failed to secure a majority.

Juan Francisco Cruz, a Vox supporter to his core, described the deal as “just a horrible situation” as he stopped for a mid-morning drink and a cigarette in the town’s damp plaza mayor.

His dismay was lessened by Vox’s national showing and by its performance in Ocaña, a town of about 11,000 people an hour south of Madrid, where the party overtook the PSOE to finish first.

The far-right grouping, led by Santiago Abascal, won 34.5% of the vote in the town, the PSOE 28.3%, the conservative People’s party (PP) 21.6%, Unidas Podemos 7.2%, and Citizens 6.5%.

Three years ago, Vox had attracted 0.62% of the vote in Ocaña. Cruz, 58, had a simple explanation for the surge.

“They’re just right on everything,” he said. “I’d always voted PP before but they’re very weak now and there’s been a lot of corruption. It’s also about immigration: there are too many illegal immigrants and they get help that Spaniards don’t. It’s just out of control and somebody needs to get a grip.”

Another local Vox voter, 75-year-old Juan Montoya, offered his own, understated take on the main issue driving Vox’s rise in towns such as Ocaña.

“Catalonia is a big mess,” he said. “I voted Vox because I want order and I want peace.”

Corruption scandals and the political deadlock prompted by the death of traditional two-party politics in Spain have bred disillusionment among millions of Spanish voters.

By seizing on that, weaponising the issue of Catalan independence and calling into question the country’s current system of regional self-government, Vox has succeeded in moving very far, very fast.

Abascal – who not so long ago was ridiculed for a video in which he appeared on horseback to announce a “reconquest” – has managed to cut through with a simple proposition: do voters want to be able to retire comfortably, or do they want to carry on footing the bill for the government of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions?

Or, as he pithily put it: “Pensions or regional governments?”

Cristina Arranz, a local businesswoman, said people were simply sick of the status quo.

“They want someone who can offer them something credible,” she said. “It’s easy to promise things but it’s difficult to deliver them. People are desperate, and when you’re desperate you go to the extremes, whether of left or right.”

Arranz, 56, said people were using Vox as a protest vote, just as people had begun to back Podemos in the aftermath of the economic crisis.

She said Citizens – whose leader, Albert Rivera, resigned on Monday – had found itself on the wrong side of history by refusing to join the Socialists’ successful attempt to unseat the corruption-mired PP last year, and by trying to compete with Vox by moving further to the right.

Both the PP and Citizens have also helped to legitimise Vox by enlisting its support to take power in Andalucía and Madrid in the past year.

Arranz’s friend, Lola Carrero, said people were leaving the PP for Vox now that Abascal had slightly recalibrated his rhetoric.

“It’s basically the same people voting for the same ideas,” she said. “Vox have softened their message and it’s worked. We’ll see if they go back to it soon.”

Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid, said Vox’s results in satellite towns around the Spanish capital and in places such as Ocaña suggested it was widening its socioeconomic base.

“Vox is a party whose origins lie in the middle and upper middle-class vote – people who used to vote for the PP and Citizens,” he said.

“But in these elections, it seems they’ve done a bit better – in relative terms – among the rural and working classes. We’re starting to see that working-class people who voted PP in the past are now turning towards Vox. As it grows, the party is developing a slightly more heterogenous electorate than it had before the April election.”

Simón said Vox looked set to continue its growth, fuelled by media that sustain the party’s momentum whether the coverage is positive or negative.

Having capitalised on voter discontent and the question of Spanish unity, he added, the party may now ape other successful European far-right parties by adopting “chauvinist strategies” over the welfare state.

“Vox still hasn’t really started doing that, but I’m sure they know that it’s a strategy that would help them grow,” said Simón.

“If there is a PSOE-Podemos government backed by Catalan pro-independence parties, that will only help Vox keep hammering away when it comes to territorial questions and general political discontent. Add to that a discourse over immigrants taking up resources and you’ve got three elements that could help Vox grow still more at the next election.”

There is much that is familiar and contemporary in Vox’s appetite for border walls, in its paradoxical, if not hypocritical, antipathy towards elites, and in its demonisation of immigrants.

And then there is the nostalgia that verges on the atavistic. Juan Montoya hankers after the peace and co-existence of the past and cannot fathom the Socialists’ decision to exhume Franco from the Valley of the Fallen last month.

“What has it achieved?” he wondered. “It’s just revived tensions between people. They should just have left him in his tomb.”

Juan Francisco Cruz, meanwhile, mourns the political correctness of the present.

“It’s a lie to say that Vox are racist. They’re just the only party that has the balls to come out and tell the truth about things.”