2023-08-02 22:38:40
This was the point. Each electoral campaign was launched from here the movement that was going to paint the map of political Spain green. The first time was in 2015. “He was a guy with two eggs.” Little more could Santiago Abascal say about the Asturian myth and he made it known to Rocío Monasterio. They took their first walk through Covadonga (Asturias), convinced of the similarities that had begun to build in public opinion: Abascal was the new Don Pelayo who would restore unity to Spain. The testicular affair was the essence of what is known in the ultra party as the “Covadonga spirit.”
Vox stays with the culture that the PP disdains
Further
“The spirit of the Reconquest is not used only in relation to the Muslim population, but also in front of the other political adversaries, collectively identified as enemies of the nation”, has written the historian Mateo Ballester Rodríguez in the essay Vox facing history (Akal). In the first campaign of 2019, he offered an alternative to the pacts “with the enemies of Spain” in the Asturian “holy cave”. He assured the ultra leader that Pedro Sánchez had agreed “with those who insulted the history of Spain in America.” In the campaign of the last generals he used the idea again because it was a very clear simile of his claims: anyone who was not a “good Spaniard” had to be expelled.
The story had never interested the politician or the voter much, but Vox was left with that empty set. And he found an illustrative plaque on the steps leading to ‘la Santina’: “Here, in Covadonga, where Pelayo began the Reconquest that made national unity possible”. That legend engraved in stone was placed by Franco’s Ministry of Information and Tourism and it is still there. Vox took advantage of the Francoist embers and shaped his political product. It seemed to work for them. “Let’s see, I see Abascal as a transparent person, he is not one of the mafia. Now you understand me. I’m still wrong, but I see myself as more protected by what he says, he gives me more confidence, ”says Luis, a resident of Cangas de Onís.
tourist myth
These days the city is packed. It is the Benidorm of the interior of Asturias. There is not a free bed left in the hotels and between the famous Roman bridge and Covadonga there is an invisible line that joins all the tourist maps of the area. And it jams them. In summer these ungovernable mountains become an inexhaustible source of income. The road is a river of vehicles looking for parking. And then there is the Sella, thirsty for water and packed with many adventures.
The population is multiplying these days, but this year the myth of Don Pelayo has attracted more “people from Alimerka” than from restaurants, says Luis, who is dedicated to selling apartments and town houses to climate refugees from Madrid. “Too much inflation and skyrocketing interest rates,” says another Luis from Cangas de Onís, who works in construction. He says that this summer those who come don’t spend, that during the day the city is crowded and at night everyone locks themselves in their rooms to eat from the supermarket.
In this fanfare of multicolored shorts and Alsa stops full of tourists waiting to be taken to the Lakes –an itinerary in which this week one of those buses had an accident causing 6 serious injuries and another 37 of lesser consideration– , Santiago Abascal set up the myth of his electoral reconquest. And he created an unprecedented link between tourism and politics. As if they were a souvenir from the past, which has scared center-right voters.
The claim has lasted four years, much less than that of Don Pelayo. According to this legend, the resistance that the Asturian leader offered in 718 to the Muslim army was the origin of the campaign that would culminate eight centuries later by the Catholic Monarchs, in Granada, in 1492. But the reconquest is a scientific fraud. “It is not a historical period, but an ideological discourse”, defend the historians Ana Isabel Carrasco and Alejandro García Sanjuán. There was no Spain to recover. “It is an invention that Franco’s ‘crusade’ used to link it to the recovery of Spanish territory,” they explain. But the myth of his electoral reconquest has failed on the fifth attempt.
Desertion of the Asturian myth
None of the three fetishes he has created to champion his rescue of “traditional and Catholic values” have worked for the far-right leader. Neither Don Pelayo, nor ‘la Santina’, nor Ramón Tamames have prevented the flight of almost 700,000 votes from the party that proposed returning to a pre-constitutional Spain. Almost a third of his “army” abandoned last Sunday the cultural crusade that intended to fight against Spain’s new enemies. They left him with 19 fewer seats in the Congress of Deputies and with an epic story of greatness and national unity made of foxes. This is how Vox became the PP’s worst nightmare and the key to the governance of the left bloc.
The pelayista spirit has not worked. Not even in Covadonga. On July 23, the green force also lost seats at the polls in the schools of Cangas de Onís, where almost 70% of the residents of the Asturian council attended the democracy party. They changed red to blue. The 3,200 residents gave their trust to the PP (43.7%), leaving the PSOE at 30.9% and withdrawing it from the self-proclaimed heirs of Pelayo (13.4%).
Vox’s political career in the cradle of its legends began in the April 2019 general elections, with 416 votes. In November of the same year they rose to 524. Last Sunday, July 23, they received 486 votes (3.2% less), while the PP grew 10.7% more. The legend pelayista It has not made it possible for Vox to represent more than 13% in the Asturian council and in the rest of Spain, 12.4%.
More management, less myths
“Let’s see, there are things that they say that call my attention. But then you see who wants to manage the council and you run away. They don’t know how to manage, they just want power. They couldn’t manage a town because they have no idea how to do it. And a council is like a company. Here we do not vote for myths or parties, here what matters to us is the person and their management ”, Luis explains the reason for the failure of Vox in the cradle of its political and historical discourse. According to what this resident of Cangas de Onís tells us, the most credible thing about the ultra-right’s proposal is his myths, not his management.
Almost a year ago, the aspiring Mr Don Pelayo appeared at the Espacio Mad Cool de Valdebebas, in Madrid, with a lot of extras dressed up as the historical myths that Vox has appropriated in these eight years. The first chapter of that meme was titled: “Everything begins at the beginning of the 8th century in the battle of Covadonga”. “Eight centuries it took to throw them out,” says the grandfather to his grandson in the presentation video. The historian and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Ana Isabel Carrasco, does not believe that this message has been defeated, because it is present in higher education. “Currently they are recovering positions of power in the universities. They are people with few investigations but many charges, ”she explains.
Even in the children’s law approved by the Community of Madrid, the right to education is discussed, says Ana Isabel Carrasco, in the same terms as the Vox program: the right that children have to be educated in the glories of the country. “Educating them in constitutional values and national glories in the same paragraph goes unnoticed and that’s why it sneaks in,” she says.
The mistrust of overacting
“Cultural phenomena only touch their niche. They have no further significance. The really dangerous ones are the sugar-coated conservatives. The big conservative stories for all audiences are the real threat, not the most blatant and exaggerated. Nationalist speeches are only good for their captive audience,” Akal’s editor, Tomás Rodríguez, told this newspaper. He points out an interesting simile about the success of nuanced discourse: “It is like the reader who reads something that he does not know if it is from the right, even if it is from the right. And he believes it ”.
Despite this, Vox in Covadonga convinced, at least, farmers and hunters. That’s what Manuel, from a nearby council, believes. He is not a Vox voter but in the winches what they say is that Barbón’s PSOE does not help them with the wolves. “That is stealing many votes from them. Here a foal is killed and they pay you a little less than 200 euros in compensation two years later. So there can be no repair. In addition, the herds do not stop growing and this year they are doing a lot of damage. We have to go up to the brañas every day to lock up the cattle in the stables”, says this loyal PSOE farmer. He asks some to get out of the legends and others to land in the problems of a community in which their towns are dying.
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How to stop the lies
The 23J campaign has made clear the tremendous importance of the free press, which depends on its readers and owes nothing to anyone else. The vast majority of the big media are owned by banks, funds and large communication groups. The vast majority of them have whitewashed the ultras and are under the control of the agenda set by the right.
That is why we ask for your support. We need to grow. Hire more journalists. Reinforce our local editions against the lies of the local and regional governments of the extreme right. Sign more investigative reporters. We need to reach more people, build a bigger newspaper, capable of countering the brutal wave of conservative propaganda that we are going to face. And that will leave small what we have experienced in this dirty electoral campaign.
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