Four words head Matteo Salvini’s autobiography: “I hate the indifferent.” A priori, the author of the phrase does not seem ideal to illustrate the experiences of a far-right nationalist leader. Because Antonio Gramsci was not only the founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921, but also a Marxist theorist today established as a totem of anti-fascism. Of course, the choice is not coincidental, nor is it that the head of the League quotes the singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André or the priest Lorenzo Milani. “It is as if Santiago Abascal cited in his memoirs Pasionaria, Paco Ibáñez and a working-class priest from Pozo del Tío Raimundo,” compares historian Steven Forti, who investigates the growing inclination of ultra family parties to appropriate speeches and symbols of the left, an outstanding trend in France and Italy but also observed in Spain. Especially in Catalonia, now the epicenter of Spanish politics.
On the night of March 12, Sílvia Orriols, mayor of Ripoll and leader of Aliança Catalana, the pro-independence and anti-immigration party that has just burst into Parliament, responded like this about a possible congratulations to Salvador Illa: “I do not congratulate imperialists ”. Among the coreligionists who supported her in front of the cameras, there were smiles, gestures of approval and even some excited shouts. The response quickly made headlines. It was predictable. It is not common for a political leader to call another “imperialist” within Spain. Nor is hearing that term in the mouths of the extreme right.
“The term ‘imperialism’ sounds like PCE, like IU. And even there it is little used anymore, it is a little moth-eaten,” says Guillermo Fernández, professor of Political Science at the Carlos III University and author of What to do with the extreme right in Europe. In his opinion, the use of the term by Orriols is loaded with political meaning and is one of the indications that the leader of Aliança “is more similar to the new European extreme right than Abascal”, which “makes her a more profile.” powerful”. Among these similarities, a varied display of discursive and aesthetic resources stands out to expand on the left, including gestures such as hanging the LGBTI flag on the façade of the Ripoll City Hall, a maneuver that was unthinkable in Vox and that in Orriols has been understood as a dressing of his accusation of homophobia against Muslims.
Fernández has also noticed the informal air of Orriols’ clothing, far from the Vox canon, and his use of protest t-shirts. The one he wore on Sunday to vote has the name of the peasant assembly movement “Revolta Pagesa” written in white on black, a nod to seeking rural support far removed from the equestrian photos of Vox, saturated with green hunting. There is a certain paraphernalia of Aliança that is closer to the CUP than to Abascal and his people. Even the video that is activated when opening their website, with images of riot police beating citizens, seems like typical material for agitation edited by the anti-system left. None of this changes the essential point: Aliança is an identity-based far-right party. But in politics not everything is substance, forms matter.
Anna López, doctor in Political Science and one of the leading specialists in this field, encourages paying special attention to Orriols because Catalonia is its habitat, a “laboratory” of extremist experiments from the rise of PxC at the beginning of the century to Aliança. What is happening in Catalonia, López points out, offers clues about the future of this entire political spectrum. And what happens is that Orriols has been disputing the CUP for the “revolutionary” label since his time in the National Front of Catalonia. At the same time, the leader of Aliança attacks the “capitalist elites” and the “employers”, whom he blames for immigration and deindustrialization.
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The finger in the eye
Another enemy to be defeated by Aliança is “globalization”, which in his opinion causes “multiculturalism”, a bete noire of both Orriols and Abascal. If the anti-globalization discourse previously associated with the left is today commonplace in the European extreme right, it is the result of decades of a “cultural battle” originating in France, as Steven Forti details in his article The ideological parasitism of the new extreme right. Right-wing and red-brown Gramscists in France, Italy and Spain (1968-2022). The key figure is Alain de Benoist, philosopher born in 1943, father of the nouvelle droite and of think tank GRECE, whose efforts are crucial to understanding the ideological evolution towards relative workerism of the National Front (FN) and its successor party, National Agrupation (AN). The desire of lepenism for fishing on the left has been such that it has even included prominent names. Florian Philippot, coming from the progressive camp, was vice president of the FN until 2017; Fabien Engelmann, a former Trotskyist militant, is AN mayor of Hayange, a historic red fiefdom.
The GRECE in turn exerted a powerful influence on the post-fascist Italian Social Movement, in whose youth Giorgia Meloni was a member. The current Prime Minister also knows what it means to draw on the repertoire of the left and play with quotes: from Fabrizio de André to Pier Paolo Pasolini, passing through Bertolt Brecht. As for Salvini, one detail leaves little doubt about his willingness to poke his rival in the eye: for the League’s Roman headquarters he chose Via delle Botteghe Oscure, where the PCI had had its headquarters. But he does not remain symbolic. Salvini, who as a young man frequented Leoncavallo, a self-managed social center that was a hotbed of the Milanese left, has had as league leader a controversial left-wing economist, Alberto Bagnai, and even Sergio Landi, a former PCI militant in another historic leftist bastion. , Leghorn.
Guillermo Fernández emphasizes how the incorporation of former leftists serves to provide extra credit to the extreme right’s diagnosis of the current left, while “legitimizing their positions, generating confusion and facilitating voting gateways.” So the red past is not hidden, it is shown. Umberto Bossi, former head of the League, and his number two, Roberto Maroni, were not shy about remembering their origins on the left. At Vox the Disenso Foundation, the think tank from Vox, presents Herman Tertsch as a former member of the Communist Party of Euskadi. And Abascal chose an old ex-communist, Ramón Tamames, for his motion of censure in 2023. The change of ideological shore is always presented as a result of a degeneration of the left, not of the individual.
The flag of transgression
Although Forti focuses on Mediterranean Europe, the rojipardismo goes further. Sahra Wagenknecht, a cultural war enthusiast from the leftist Die Linke and married to the veteran social democrat Oskar Lafontaine, has set up a party in Germany, the BSW, which stands out in the polls by mixing postulates typical of the AfD ultras, especially against immigration and culture woke up, with a speech in defense of workers’ rights. The BSW is among the beneficiaries of a climate of confusion that allows continuous “semantic opas” to be launched against the left, to use Forti’s expression. Steve Bannon himself, guru of the new extreme right, has defended that progressives must challenge every concept, every flag, every myth. He himself sets an example and defines himself as a “Leninist.”
To what extent is the Spanish extreme right following the invitation to “parasitism”? In Aliança the commitment is obvious, says Guillermo Fernández, who affirms that for this it is not necessary for its leaders to have read French theorists because “the extreme right viralizes ideas and shares experiences effectively through many channels, especially social networks. , imitating each other.” As for Vox, he sees a desire to “approach” the domains of the left, especially as a “provocation.” There you can register from their union, Solidaridad, to their Viva festivals, with a format reminiscent of the PCE’s annual festivals. But Macarena Olona also fits in there citing Julio Anguita or different spokespersons using Lorca, Alberti and even Che Guevara to defend bullfighting.
For Anna López, resorting to emblems of the left is “an easy way to gain television minutes,” especially because the recipients of the dart usually get into the trap. But this is not the way – she adds – that is bringing more revenue to Vox, but rather the appropriation of the concept of “rebellion” in contrast to the supposed puritanism of the left. Steven Forti agrees. Although Vox is a less modern party than its European peers, it has also known how to present itself as a “transgressor,” in the opinion of the author of Far right 2.0. From Argentina, Pablo Stefanoni also concludes that the main progressive flag that the right has managed to appropriate is that of “indignation.” Author of the essay Has the rebellion turned right?Stefanoni believes that we live in a time in which the “great political narratives” of the 20th century have given way to “internet trolling”, optimal terrain for the radical right to pose as a rebel against the supposed “progressive totalitarianism”.
With a background of two decades studying this political space, Anna López warns against the error of undervaluing these incoherent incursions of the extreme right into foreign fields. If there is “discontent” among the left-wing electorate with their parties, she points out, an ultra-advance on classic left-wing grounds is perfectly possible, despite the obvious contradictions. An example is provided by Le Pen, who not only presents herself as a champion of political incorrectness, but also claims the role of guardian of republican secularism. This is a value foreign to the historical matrix of a party in whose creation Catholic traditionalists had a lot to say. However, Le Pen has known how to redefine secularism to put it at the service of her crusade against “Islamization.” And who else has defended a secular State for the same reason? Sílvia Orriols, in her case for a dreamed of independent Catalonia in which, at the same time, she would govern a “natural order” based on “traditions.”
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