‘Una, Grande Y Libre’: Authoritarian Nostalgia and the Electoral Appeal of Vox

Since the emergence of Vox in 2018, the politicization of historical memory in Spain has expanded decisively to the right. The party’s discourse combines calls to “move on” from the past with recurrent invocations of history and the attribution of blame for the Civil War to the left. In recent elections, opposition to “memory laws” and revisionist narratives have become central to Vox’s ideological identity and electoral strategy, often infused with elements of authoritarian nostalgia. Drawing on original survey data, this paper examines how attitudes toward Spain’s twentieth-century past shape contemporary voting behavior. We find that endorsement of revisionist and nostalgic views of the Francoist period significantly increases the likelihood of supporting Vox (and, to a lesser extent, the Popular Party). Moreover, this relationship is partly mediated by nationalist preferences for centralization and resistance to regional autonomy, suggesting that the politicization of history operates through broader territorial and state-centered conceptions of authority in contemporary Spain.