So everyone has to choose what side of history they want to be part of.Beyond Spain, a PP-Vox government would mean another EU member has moved firmly to the right, a trend seen recently in Sweden, Finland and Italy. We must insist that fascism is not a political option nor a respectable opinion. Even worse, there’s a certain kind of Left that buys into far-right framings.Īnti-fascism has a huge amount of work to do, but a very valuable heritage. Still today, there are journalists who don’t know the games the far right plays with media. My book wants to pay tribute to people that all too often struggled alone. The question that needs answering is why people, many of them very young, who fought against the far right were left on their own - so, not what they did wrong, but where the rest of society was. I’ve been asked, in other interviews, if anti-fascism has failed. Spain was one of the last European countries where the far right entered parliament, and I think that has increased awareness. The anti-fascist militant isn’t usually just against fascism.Īnti-fascism still counts for a lot among democratic-minded people - it’s part of their DNA. And this movement joins with others such as squatting, anti-globalization, and those who fight for more social, livable neighborhoods. The brighter side of the story is that anti-fascism is also organizing. Although the far right disguises itself as democratic, there are still violent groups on the streets. The current stage is that we have, for the first time in Spain, a far-right party, Vox, in the institutions. The third phase was the rise of neofascist social movements influenced by the French Nouvelle Droite, such as Italy’s CasaPound - groups that directly imitate the strategies and symbols of the radical left. After that, the far right tried to form regular political parties and soften their speech, playing to the gallery. First, they had some more tribal features associated with skinheads and football hooligans - that was between the mid-1980s and the 2000s. Ignacio Pato spoke to Ramos about far-right street movements in Spain, their relationship to the parliamentary right, and how they can be fought. In a year and a half, trans woman Sonia Rescalvo in Barcelona, migrant worker of Dominican origin Lucrecia Pérez in Madrid, and Agulló were all killed.Įver since then, Ramos began to collect press clippings about the subject, building toward the work he has now published on thirty years of militant opposition to far-right, fascist, and neo-Nazi movements in Spain, entitled Antifascistas: Así se combatió a la extrema derecha española desde los años 90. Indeed, the 1990s were years in which teenagers saw rising fascist violence in the streets. Ramos knew Agulló through his presence in left-wing demonstrations and political spaces. A month before Miquel turned fourteen, the eighteen-year-old activist Guillem Agulló was stabbed to death by far-right militants. That’s something committed anti-fascists have known for over three decades.Īs for many others from his generation, anti-fascism is a personal matter for journalist Miquel Ramos, born in Valencia in 1979. The Spanish far right isn’t just back: it never really went away. But recognizing these forces’ power today is also about facing up to reality. For decades, it had painted Spain as an oasis of democracy, even the only country in Europe without a far right, just because it didn’t show up on election day. If a decade ago Vox didn’t exist, today its leaders appear on prime-time comedy shows - and with general elections slated for 2023, they could soon even be in cabinet.Īll this has been a surprise to a certain mainstream mantra. Earlier this year, it joined the government in Castilla y León, Spain’s largest region. With 3.7 million votes (15 percent) and fifty-two seats, Vox became the third-largest party in the Congreso de los Diputados. In Spain’s last general election in 2019, the far right achieved its best ever result.
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