“Before, Vox was a party for the middle and upper-middle classes, but more recently it’s winning support among lower-income groups,” he said. “And it’s managing to secure support among rural, sparsely populated areas; the small towns, where people have low incomes.”
Disasters fuel Vox’s upswing
The wildfires are the latest in a series of national crises that have roiled the country’s toxic politics.
In October 2024, flash floods in eastern Spain killed more than 220 people, leading to an angry row between the PP and PSOE. The dispute went as far as Brussels when the conservatives unsuccessfully tried to block the appointment of former Socialist minister Teresa Ribera as European commissioner.
Vox, by contrast, has used the wildfires to promote its own platform based on denial of climate change, describing the government’s policies as “climate terrorism.” | Fernando Sanchez/Europa Press via Getty Images
In April, a blackout — whose cause has still not been fully explained — left the country without electricity for several hours, generating outlandish conspiracy theories and another political squabble.
Vox has cast these crises as evidence of a failing state, even linking them to immigration and citing what some have criticized as the slow supply of aid in response to the eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands in 2021.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a volcano, a pandemic, a migrant invasion, a flood, a blackout — or now, wildfires,” Vox leader Abascal said. “The state has been collapsed and occupied by a corrupt mafia at the service of Pedro Sánchez.”