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Pedro SánchezPPPPEUSALFLGBTYour browser does not support the element., Spain’s socialist prime minister, likes to boast of “feminist Spain”. But at the Transatlantic Summit for Freedom and the Culture of Life, held on December 2nd in the halls of the country’s senate, a different Spain was on view. Representatives of the hard-right Vox party denounced abortion and railed against a “culture of death”. The gathering was not all greybeards. Vox is making a fair bid to appeal to Spain’s youth, not despite its traditionalism but because of it.Vox first won a big share of the vote in 2019. Since then its support has stayed above 10% in each election. A notable recent trend is its strength among young people. Polls this autumn put its support among 18-30-year-olds between 16% and 20%, roughly even with the centre-right People’s Party (). Vox does much better with voters under 45 than with older ones; for the the reverse is true.Vox’s appeal to young people mixes populist economics with cultural provocation. In a recent post on the Instagram page of its youth division, Santiago Abascal, the party’s leader, said the country needs —“more walls and fewer Moors”, an insulting reference to North African immigrants. At the anti-abortion summit, the party’s general secretary, Ignacio Garriga, accused opponents of favouring “substitution policies instead of promoting birth rates”, echoing conspiracy theories that elites are trying to replace Europeans with immigrants.The party’s appeal to youth is also rooted in economic frustration. Where older generations associated Spain’s transition to democracy with a higher standard of living, newer ones feel duped, says Oriol Bartomeus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Youth unemployment is the highest in the European Union: 26.5% as of September, almost double the average in the . Home ownership among those under 35 has fallen from nearly 70% to 32% in the past decade. Over 70% of those with jobs live with their parents.Young people who vote for Vox are often looking for any alternative, says Antonio Jesús, a 19-year-old in Cordoba. They have grown cynical towards mainstream politics. Antonio Jesús’s friend Leonor did not vote in last year’s general election: “I don’t think that any party, either on the left or the right, represents me.”That anti-establishment mood is buoying other political entrepreneurs as well. In the European Parliament elections in June, Luis “Alvise” Pérez Fernández, a far-right influencer, raked in over 800,000 votes for The Party Is Over (), a party he had founded only 40 days before the vote. His campaign relied mainly on TikTok, Instagram and podcasts. Viewers “want to hear something different”, says Isaac Parejo, a YouTuber known to his 411,000 followers as InfoVlogger. Mr Parejo says his audience is being radicalised not by his videos, in which he rages against Muslims, wokery and the agenda, but by the realities of Spaniards’ everyday lives.Vox has yet to score the sort of victory won by hard-right parties in countries like Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands. Its share of the vote fell from 15.1% in the 2019 election to 12.4% in last year’s election. But the party’s gains among young voters are striking. In a country ruled for decades by the right-wing dictator Francisco Franco, some older moderate Spaniards find its appeal hard to understand. “If they had lived just a small period of the dictatorship,” says Ángela Reyes Gutierrez, a 64-year-old from the small town of Dos Torres, “they wouldn’t be voting that way”.
