{"id":183389,"date":"2025-11-16T08:59:28","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T08:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/183389\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T08:59:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T08:59:28","slug":"spanish-youth-flirt-with-far-right-as-50th-anniversary-of-dictators-death-nears-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/183389\/","title":{"rendered":"Spanish youth flirt with far right as 50th anniversary of dictator\u2019s death nears \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A crowd of students is gathered outside the campus of CEU San Pablo, a private university in Madrid, waiting for Vito Quiles. When the 25-year-old far-right activist arrives, a celebratory chant goes up, albeit one aimed at Spain<\/a>\u2019s Socialist prime minister: \u201cPedro S\u00e1nchez<\/a>, hijo de puta!\u201d (Pedro S\u00e1nchez, son of a whore!\u201d).<\/p>\n

To cheers and applause, Quiles goes inside to take part in an onstage interview. Such is the demand to see him that many students are turned away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are on the right side of history,\u201d he tells the room, responding to questions put to him by an anchor, as a grim-faced bodyguard stands nearby.<\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cIn many situations it\u2019s very difficult to give an opinion without being told you\u2019re a fascist. I want to make clear to youngsters who think differently that they are not alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quiles is Spain\u2019s latest far-right phenomenon, whose social media presence and provocative public persona have given him something like rock-star status among many of the country\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n

\"VitoVito Quiles, a Spanish far-right activist compares himself to Charlie Kirk. Photograph: Guy Hedgecoe <\/p>\n

\u201cThe way young people think is changing; a lot of us are tired of the same old thing,\u201d says Antonio Aranguren, a student at the event. \u201cVito Quiles is one of the few people of our generation who is trying to change things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI identify with him, he\u2019s calling for freedom,\u201d says Julia Monje, another student.<\/p>\n

Yet many others believe Quiles is part of a deeply disturbing phenomenon that is a throwback to the ideas and values of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco. <\/p>\n

\"FranciscoFrancisco Franco. Photograph: Getty <\/p>\n

Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the dictator\u2019s death and, after half a century of democratic consolidation, there are concerns that Spain is in danger of forgetting its own recent past.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a great deal of ignorance within Spanish society, particularly among young people, about what the Franco regime meant,\u201d says Guillermo Fern\u00e1ndez V\u00e1zquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book on the European far right.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat ignorance makes it easier for a kind of whitewashing of Francoism to become possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"VitoVito Quiles arrives at the Pablo Olavide University of Seville (UPO), October 23rd. Photograph: Francisco J Olmo\/Europa Press\/Getty <\/p>\n

Vito Quiles is keen to compare himself to Charlie Kirk<\/a>, the American activist-polemicist who was assassinated in September. In recent weeks, the Spaniard has been carrying out a Kirk-inspired round of visits to universities, which he has called the \u201cCombative Spain Tour\u201d. <\/p>\n

The difference with the American is that the public campuses he visits have not given him permission to speak \u2013 they say he has not requested authorisation, while he says his freedom of speech is being curtailed. Most of Quiles\u2019s appearances at these venues have consisted of him delivering diatribes against the left through a megaphone, sometimes cloaked in the Spanish flag, as he is roared on by those watching, mainly young men.<\/p>\n

Quiles describes himself as a journalist. However, he has a political background, having a stint as press officer for Se Acab\u00f3 La Fiesta (SALF), a far-right party that won 800,000 votes in the last European elections. In recent months SALF has been beset by a series of legal actions against its leader, Alvise P\u00e9rez, for alleged illegal financing, harassing his own party colleagues and distributing false information about a Catalan politician. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the far-left Podemos party has filed a complaint against Quiles for allegedly stirring up racist hatred in the southern town of Torre Pacheco in the summer, where there were disturbances involving immigrants.<\/p>\n

At the Madrid university event, Quiles says he defends young people, the family, freedom of speech, low taxes and respect for the constitution. Only occasionally does he stray into overtly far-right terrain, such as when he warns of the threat of immigrants who rape Spanish women.<\/p>\n

At a university in M\u00e1laga in October, things took a dark turn when some of his supporters waved pre-constitutional flags, associated with the Franco regime. Others raised their arms in the fascist salute and sang the Francoist anthem Cara al Sol. There were similar scenes when he appeared outside the university of Granada.<\/p>\n

\"AA pre-constitutional Spanish flag, associated with the Franco regime. Photograph: Marcos del Mazo\/LightRocket via Getty <\/p>\n

A recent poll published by national broadcaster RTVE suggests such attitudes are not exceptional, with 23 per cent of Spaniards under the age of 25 expressing a favourable view of the dictatorship. At the same time, Spain\u2019s prime far-right force, Vox, has been rising in polls, which show that it is currently the most popular party among the young.<\/p>\n

Much of this phenomenon is due to social media presence, says Fern\u00e1ndez V\u00e1zquez.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a sort of chorus, a polyphony of voices speaking the language of the far right in the media and on platforms where young people get their information or their entertainment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He also points to a backlash against Spain\u2019s recent legislation relating to sexual equality and consent, introduced by the left and which the far right tends to portray as unfair on men. <\/p>\n

With Vox, Quiles and their allies casting the ideas and values of the left and the struggling S\u00e1nchez government as the oppressive mainstream, for many young Spaniards, rebellion now means being on the radical right.<\/p>\n

\"Spain'sSpain’s prime minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez, whose administration has done more than others to tackle the legacy of Franco. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou\/AFP\/Getty <\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez\u2019s administration has done more than any other to tackle the legacy of Franco and the 1936-39 civil war that preceded the dictatorship. In 2019 it oversaw the exhumation of Franco\u2019s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum in the mountains north of Madrid that glorified his legacy, and their reburial in more low-key cemetery.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018They want revenge\u2019: Spanish government accused of playing politics with Franco\u2019s bitterly divisive legacyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Earlier this year the government reached an agreement with the Vatican under which the pro-Franco prior who administered the site was removed while the Benedictine community remained. This month the winning bid to redesign and \u201cresignify\u201d the mausoleum, whose grandiose architecture projects Franco\u2019s National-Catholicism ideology, has been announced, with a new interpretation centre to be part of the \u20ac26 million makeover. The renovated site will \u201cinvite dialogue and a more plural, more democratic vision,\u201d according to I\u00f1aqui Carnicero, the government\u2019s head of urban planning and architecture.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Valley of the Fallen, where the body of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was exhumed in 2019. Photograph: Emilio Naranjo\/Pool\/Getty <\/p>\n

In 2022 S\u00e1nchez\u2019s government pushed through parliament a democratic memory law, declaring the Franco regime illegal and deeming the public defence of it a criminal offence. The legislation allowed children and grandchildren of Spaniards who were forced into exile during the civil war and dictatorship to claim Spanish citizenship.<\/p>\n

In addition, the law gave the state responsibility for identifying and exhuming the remains of the victims of Franco in unmarked graves, who campaigners estimate number more than 100,000.<\/p>\n

Fernando Mart\u00ednez L\u00f3pez, minister for democratic memory, said the legislation \u201cputs the victims at the centre of public policy\u201d for the first time.<\/p>\n

But any government initiative in the area of historical memory tends to face resistance from the centre-right and hostility from the far right. Both oppose what they see as the unnecessary digging up of the past and use of it to present the left as morally superior.<\/p>\n

And yet, it is often the far right that reminds Spaniards of the dictatorship. The mayor of the Andalusian town of Puente de G\u00e9nave, Francisco Garc\u00eda Avil\u00e9s, of Vox, recently caused a stir by printing several hundred 2026 calendars bearing a portrait of Franco and the words \u201cUp with Spain!\u201d The mayor said criticism of the calendar was simply because \u201ca few traumatised people can\u2019t accept the fact they lost a war in 1936\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"FrancoFranco meeting Adolf Hitler at the Franco-Spanish border, on October 23rd, 1940. Photograph: Roger Viollet\/Getty Images \"AA woman holds the Spanish republican flag during a protest in Madrid against the impunity for the crimes committed during the Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Photograph: Jorge Sanz\/Getty <\/p>\n

There are those who feel that, rather than coming back to haunt Spain, the Francoist mindset never went away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis country has faked a disconnection from the dictatorship,\u201d says Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH). He points to the continuing existence of monuments built to glorify the regime, or streets named in honour of Franco and his allies, such as one in Madrid named after the Blue Division, the Spaniards who fought for Hitler.<\/p>\n

For more than two decades Silva and his association have been tirelessly campaigning on this issue and carrying out painstaking work exhuming unmarked graves of victims of Franco and his regime and identifying the remains through DNA testing \u2013 until recently with barely any government support.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last few years this country has managed not to provide justice to victims but at least to make them visible, although you can\u2019t say the same for those responsible [for human rights abuses],\u201d he says, pointing to the fact that legal obstacles have prevented Spain from carrying out a single prosecution against members of the regime.<\/p>\n

Silva sees the shadow of Franco still hindering many areas of Spanish life: preventing youngsters from protesting more at their precarious living conditions, or protecting corrupt politicians and members of the Catholic Church who might otherwise face abuse charges. Four decades of Franco, Silva says, instilled \u201ca culture of impunity\u201d to which Spain is still in thrall.<\/p>\n

\"FrancoFranco salutes during the singing of the nationalist national anthem at Burgos Cathedral, Castile, Spain, in 1938. Photograph: Hulton Archive\/Getty <\/p>\n

Despite his pessimism, there are youngsters who are pushing back against the wave of far-right support and nostalgia for the Franco years.<\/p>\n

Marina Sanmor is a political science and law student who has taken the fight to the likes of Quiles with videos on social media portraying the agitator as someone who is taking advantage of the current climate despite lacking clear political ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cA very big chasm has opened up for our generation in which we have no stability, we don\u2019t have housing, there\u2019s no prospect of a stable future,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd within that instability, all sorts of hate speech has crept in and, above all, rhetoric that defends Francoism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A crowd of students is gathered outside the campus of CEU San Pablo, a private university in Madrid,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[51262,9,10,41120,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,81065,383,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-183389","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-adolf-hitler","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-charlie-kirk","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-latest-news","16":"tag-latestnews","17":"tag-main-news","18":"tag-mainnews","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-pedro-sanchez","21":"tag-spain","22":"tag-top-stories","23":"tag-topstories","24":"tag-world","25":"tag-world-news","26":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115558558758507170","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}