Vox party membership up dramatically in Spain
The extreme right-wing Vox party burst onto the stage with 400,000 votes in Andalusia and as the potential key to a Partido Popular and Ciudadanos coalition government in the Andalusian parliament last month. Having only had around five thousand members across the Spanish state in January 2018, by December of last year their membership was up to 24,023. A notable 8,000 of these new members were acquired between the night of the Andalusian elections and today. In Catalonia, the far-right party, who seeks the anti-constitutional abolition of the autonomous community governments in Spain, has received an additional 1,388 sign-ups, the bulk of which come from urban areas, in particular Barcelona (1,070), Tarragona (847), Girona (84) and Lleida (47). The party’s rhetoric is straight out of Francoist Spain, prior to the Transition, and they parrot Franco, seeking to return to the days of an “España Grande”. Despite theclamour around the murder of Profesor Laura Luelmo in Huelva, or the muder of a woman by her husband in Laredo yesterday, Vox’s Javier Ortega Smith, made no concessions in tone, continuing to demand the repealing of the Law against Gender Violence, one of the few laws which currently engenders cross-parliamentary support.