“When the UK calls and says we’ve found bank robbers in Marbella, the Spanish police arrive in hours, arrests them and sends them over,” says Mr Espinosa. “Trump has been very strong against the progressive, politically-correct movement in the US,” says Mr Espinosa.Īgain, it is a policy which inevitably sets Vox on a collision course with the UK. Such derision only drives Vox’s admiration for Trump and his former political advisor Steve Bannon, who is visiting Spain next week and is close to a key figure in the party, Rafael Bardaji. The EU is instead for Vox the site of a cultural battle - having, in Mr Espinosa’s eyes, been “taken over by this cohort of progressives imposing a certain philosophical agenda”. He is equally dismissive of Brussels - “such a concentration of waste” - but has no plans to leave the EU, from which Spain is a net recipient of several billion euros each year. “I want these people to feel the thrill of finding a job - going back to the real world as opposed to living off other people’s taxes,” he says. Mr Espinosa certainly shares with the many in the Conservative Party an unvarnished advocacy of wealth and job-creation, low taxes and small government, proposing to lower income tax to 21 per cent, do away with many other taxes altogether, and slash the public sector to balance the books. The Vox delegation says that, despite the Brexit turmoil, it met “two or three” Tory MPs on its trip to the UK. He puts Vox on a par with Poland’s Law and Justice party or, in Britain, with the Conservatives. For the first five years of its existence Vox, founded in 2013, barely troubled the opinion pollsters, as analysts suggested that memories of Franco, and the right-of-centre domination of the People’s Party (PP), had inoculated the country from national-populist surges familiar elsewhere. Such ambition marks a political transformation in Spain. Now, ahead of a general election scheduled for the end of April, it is aiming higher. Last December it won 12 seats in Andalusian polls, helping end almost 40 years of socialist rule. Neatly bearded and suavely dressed, Mr Espinosa is the public, international face of Vox, a nationalist party led by Santiago Abascal which in the past year has risen from nowhere to a decisive position in the politics of Europe’s fifth biggest economy. “We’re really, really, optimistic about the future of our great country,” he says echoing, consciously or not, the US president. In Spain’s case that means firing a lot of civil servants, replacing the fences around Ceuta and Melilla - the Spanish enclaves in Morocco - with walls, and dramatically cutting taxes and bureaucracy. “But then Spain is the world-champion of political correctness.” He prefers a comparison with Donald Trump and can’t resist promising, in his perfect, American-accented English, to “drain the swamp, build that wall, and make Spain great again”. “In Spain we are considered the fascist, ultra-radical right,” says Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros.
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