Barricade progressivism: Ignacio Camacho's warning in Spain's ABC

Ignacio Camacho argues in ABC that the Spanish Government's tolerance of street riots and vandalism responds to an electoral calculation aimed at boosting Vox and wearing down the PP. The columnist links that permissiveness to a term of office resting on a deal with the frontmen of a terrorist organisation.

The columnist **Ignacio Camacho** published an article in **ABC** on **27 October 2026** entitled "Barricade pogre", in which he analyses the relationship between street political violence and the Government's strategy. His central thesis is that the Executive treats outbreaks of vandalism with a tolerance bordering on complacency, and that this abdication of responsibility has concrete electoral consequences.

## The electoral-calculation thesis

Camacho suggests that some electoral adviser to the **PSOE** holds such a poor view of its voters that he seems to believe violence benefits **Pedro Sánchez**. Tension and mobilising agitation have become, in his view, a plague of postmodern politics, and the laboratory of **La Moncloa** (the Spanish Prime Minister's office) cultivates it as if calling a strike were the same as building burning barricades, wrecking urban spaces and looting shops.

The columnist argues that the demand for order always benefits the right. From this he deduces that the Government's tolerance could be deliberate: boosting **Vox** to seek a stalemate with a **PP** in constant demographic decline. That move would not prevent the likely transfer of power, but it could serve Sánchez's goal of staying at the head of his party if, even defeated, he manages a presentable showing.

## The precedent of the Second Republic

The article draws on a conversation the author had with **Julio Anguita** during one of the late communist leader's night-time walks through the Andalusian capital of Seville. Anguita told him that the Republic had failed through a lack of democratic authority. He linked the permissiveness towards church burnings and the loss of control on the streets to a loss of confidence that undermined the regime's legitimacy from its earliest stage.

Camacho endorses that diagnosis and adds that the left no longer retains enough insight to understand the mechanisms of citizen reaction. Anguita, like **Felipe González**, is now seen within his own camp as a relic. The columnist wonders where the resident political scientists think the absolute majorities came from that one of them won in **Córdoba** and the other in Spain.

## Institutional degradation

The text notes that the Executive is more concerned about possible police excesses than about the breakdown of civic coexistence. He claims that disciplinary files against members of the **Policía** (Spain's national police) pile up so that no one can say the government leadership condones any kind of repressive brutality. In its eagerness to polarise, he argues, it ignores the empirical reality that many of its potential voters are also victims of the spiral of extremist fury.

Camacho describes a process of institutional and sarracena degradation which, from his perspective, is understandable given the origin of this term of office: a deal with the frontmen of a terrorist organisation. Those responsible for guaranteeing public peace, he concludes, show empathy with the activism that destabilises it.