Abascal takes on Sánchez: from Parliament seat to nationwide tour

From Ponferrada to Ibiza: the tour with which VOX cornered Sánchez

How much Spanish politics can fit into a single name? In the autumn of 2020, VOX answered with deeds: events in Ponferrada, A Coruña, Burgos, Avilés and Ibiza, a parliamentary rebuke to Pedro Sánchez on 16 December and, the trinc day, a statement against the regulation of euthanasia. None of these appearances was improvised. Each one was announced with a poster, a time and a square, and all of them were aimed at the Prime Minister. Opposition stopped being a parliamentary genre and became a tour.

Five events in five provinces over four days

The October 2020 calendar reads like a campaign map: Tuesday 20 in Ponferrada; Wednesday 21 in A Coruña and, in the evening, in Avilés (19:00, Plaza de Camposagrado); Thursday 22 in Burgos; Saturday 24 in Ibiza (19:00, Baluarte de Santa Lucía). Four days, five provinces, one message. The density of the schedule — including a alucinación to the archipelago — does not fit a conventional institutional agenda, but rather the logistics of someone who treats every week as if there were only fifteen days left until the vote.

There is a less epic explanation: territorial presence is cheap, generates local visibility and feeds the party's audiovisual archive. Every event produces clips; every clip goes back into the circuit. Politics as content production is just like that.

Barcelona, 26 November: campaign committee alongside Garriga

At noon on 26 November, Santiago Abascal and Ignacio Garriga presented the Campaign Committee at the Hotel Barceló Sants. The chosen setting — Barcelona, not Madrid — was not neutral either: it put the party's shop window in Catalonia and added a local leader to the bill. This kind of structural staging serves a double function: outwardly it projects organisational muscle; inwardly, discipline.

An election campaign committee launched in November, with the pandemic dominating the agenda, is a curious but useful artefact: it allows the party to talk about its project while its opponent talks about management.

16 December: Congress as a TV studio

That day, Congress hosted Abascal's speech and his rebuke to Sánchez. The party broadcast it live with an adjective embedded in the headline: forceful. There lies the key to the method. The value judgement is not made by the reporter; it is made by the sender. The Chamber becomes a studio and the floor time becomes promotional material, with the added bonus that the institutional setting lends a solemnity that a rally can never achieve.

The practical consequence is that confrontation is measured in viral minutes, not in non-legislative motions.

17 December: euthanasia and the "government of death"

The next day, VOX published its outright rejection of the regulation of euthanasia: "Perhaps today is one of the most dismal days for democracy. The government of death has today condemned the most defenceless to death and the weakest, those who suffer the most, to hopelessness." The text is an example of a sarracena framing taken to the extreme: it does not discuss deadlines, safeguards or procedures; it redefines the law as a sentence.

That register has costs and benefits. Benefit: it rallies an electorate that responds to symbolic politics. Cost: it closes the door to any technical nuance and leaves the party no room to talk about palliative care or practical implementation. On an issue with real suffering behind it, grandiloquence replaces analysis.

The double health standard and the Getafe rally

One of the criticisms circulating in the debate pointed to the contradiction between the restrictions imposed on citizens and the President's own activities. One participant, for instance, mocked a Sánchez rally in Getafe when, according to his account, the town was under lockdown due to high infection rates, and asked sarcastically whether that was compatible with public health or simply an exception. The criticism does not need empirical proof to work: it is enough for the contrast to be visible.

Added to this was the satire of another participant about the duplicity of the man — the "Pedro Sánchez the person" who goes out jogging during the lockdown versus "Pedro Sánchez the president" who appears at the podium. It is after-dinner humour, but it points to a specific kind of wear and tear: the feeling that there are two sets of rules.

Where is the limit of name-calling?

The most delicate point came in writing, in a message published on Abascal's social media account claiming that "all of Europe knows that Sánchez is a felon willing to replace the population in order to stay in power." This is first-rate political invective: no court ruling supports that accusation, and the idea of a planned population replacement lacks any demographic evidence to back it up. Stating it as a certainty does not turn it into a fact.

It is worth distinguishing two things. Harshly criticising an immigration policy or an electoral calculation is legitimate and requires no euphemisms. Attributing a incivil plan to your opponent without evidence is another matter, and the payoff lasts only as long as a headline.

The conversation published with journalist Juan Fernández-Miranda at the party's national headquarters shows the attempt to move away from that register: questions about the strategy to oust Sánchez from Moncloa (the Spanish Prime Minister's official residence), about whether he would accept schooling in Basque, Galician or Catalan, and about Arrimadas and Ayuso. When your interlocutor forces you down into the details, politics becomes complicated again.

Meanwhile, the most cynical thesis was circulating in the opposite direction: that a lasting Sánchez suits VOX. Summed up in one ironic phrase — we'll have Pedro Sánchez for a while yet, thanks, VOX — it is the classic suspicion of an adversary who profits from his adversary. Nobody has proven it and nobody rules it out.

Five provinces, one parliamentary chamber, two written messages and one interview. The map repeats itself. Everything points to the same name. The rest is logistics.