Derecha sin complejos: Vox’s radical agenda in pandemic-driven Spain

Over the last few years, Vox has emerged as a new and electorally important party in the Spanish political system. Its radical right-wing ideology and discourse are being analysed and compared to similar actors in the European context. Recent literature stresses Vox’s key elements such as nativism, xenophobia, cultural conservatism, as well as state centralism combined with a neoliberal economic stance. However little has been said about current Vox’s narrative and positioning on matters linked to the covid pandemic such as scientific support, evidence-based policy making, and lockdown measures, and alike. What are Vox’s discursive strategies on such matters? How has Vox’s populist-nationalist-sovranist compound evolved during the pandemic? This paper investigates these aspects by drawing on a body of literature that combines affect and discourse analysis (e.g. Wetherell et al., 2015), and by performing a qualitative analysis of Vox’s political communication. The dataset consists of the party’s social media (Twitter, FB) communication, key parliamentary speeches, and press releases published between March 2020 and March 2021. The analysis shows the lines of political clash, which mainly originates from the struggle over the meaning of and the political solutions to the covid-19 crisis. Moreover, the pandemic not only creates the opportunity for Vox to gain further popularity by promoting anti-lockdown protests, it also shows how the climate of crisis exacerbates the party’s ideological traits (i.e. nativism, sovranism, cultural conservatism), its territorial approach to national identity (i.e. centralism), and its political strategies (i.e. affective practices, negationism).