Speaker:
- David Rodríguez Solás
Fellow MIAS - François Chevalier
Casa de Velázquez
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In November 2023, the Spanish far-right organized the longest-running mobilization since the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Since then, protests have been held every night in front of the PSOE headquarters in Madrid. The demonstrators accuse the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, of imposing an amnesty for hundreds of people prosecuted for organizing the Catalonia referendum on October 1, 2017. Massive protests are the far-right's tool to coordinate a violent opposition.
In October 2024, the DANA (severe weather system) that devastated Valencia and other areas of southeastern Spain triggered a wave of solidarity among volunteers. However, far-right organizations infiltrated these volunteers and incited a mob that attacked Prime Minister Sánchez and threw mud at King Felipe VI when they visited the flooded areas. They used the floods to saturate the network with fake news that discredited Sánchez's government while pushing the global far-right agenda. These included claims that the government had blown up dams (global warming denial), the occupation and looting of shops by immigrants (xenophobia), and inaccurate casualty figures (conspiracy theory). The far-right distorted the leftist slogan "only the people can save the people," which praises solidarity, to spread the idea that democratic institutions are unnecessary because they abandon the people during a catastrophe.
This presentation analyzes how the global far-right manufactures its ideas and disseminates them through performance as a type of "dog-whistle politics" to construct imaginaries with messages that are "inaudible to a broader group but acutely heard by their target subgroup" (Steen 2019: 116). In particular, the Spanish far-right has adopted the imaginary of the Franco dictatorship to build a collective identity that opposes liberal democracy.
