Bad news for Vox, good news for democracy

Liberal is a very liberal word in itself, which admits an enormous elasticity of meanings, meanings and nuances. An American leftist feels as liberal as a banker. He serves to write the synopsis for Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Servitude, and to qualify Salma Hayek’s uninhibited attitude in From Dusk Till Dawn. It serves as an insult and as a compliment, and for this reason it is a wild card to talk about things that are neither chicha nor lemon and appear in the fourth state of matter, which is flabby. Tinto de verano or non-alcoholic beer would be liberal, as apparently Iván Espinosa de los Monteros was at Vox. Being a liberal in Spain means that your gang doesn’t know what to do with you: a liberal is someone who doesn’t want to half pay the restaurant bill because he only ordered a salad and a glass of water.

Only in that figurative sense and as a euphemism can it be understood that Vox has a liberal sector. Possibility, others say, refining the shot more. Left wing, the horniest point. I prefer to speak of naive. Only from a radical political ingenuity can it be argued that Vox would accommodate itself to the logic of a party system that it despises by nature and that it has set out to destroy. That is why he likes the adjective liberal in the colloquial sense with which it is usually used in Spain: lazy, deluded.

Espinosa de los Monteros and his liberal friends believed that they could turn a reactive force like Vox, the result of nationalist, tribal and pre-political anger, into just another party, with an agenda, influence and institutional strategy. The last elections confirm a failure that came from afar: Vox does not manage to lepenize, it does not reach the popular classes or the peripheries that feel marginalized from democracy, and despite the power that it has swept away in the autonomous pacts, it has withdrawn in an anti-system nucleus where the lukewarm do not fit. Vox is much smaller, primary and coarse today than it was a few months ago: it has gathered around an anvil, like in Vulcano’s forge. Contrary to what it may seem, this is excellent news for democrats, whether they are liberal or not, since a reactionary force led by figures like Buxadé can only aspire to irrelevance. Without liberals with an institutional sense or strategists who know how to take advantage of social discontent, the proverbial reactionary wave that mobilized the left on July 23 will remain in a wave that will only drown the reactionaries themselves.

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