Jordi Wild and the 'uneducated' vote: a frame born broken

Jordi Wild and the 'uneducated' vote: a frame born broken

A tweet from Jordi Wild claims that not everyone who votes for VOX is a fascist, but that the party has known how to sell the idea and capture the populist, less educated vote — the one that is angry at everything. The remark is years old — it is attributed to 2019 — and still stirs controversy. The problem is not what it says, but what it assumes: that there is a vote qualified by education level and another that is not.

The first objection comes from the speaker himself. What authority does a content creator have to hand out education certificates? The second is more fundamental: voting does not qualify you. People vote according to what squeezes their wallet, not according to which issues of Spain's official gazette they have read.

From 'posh Cayetano types' to 'lumpen': the voter who changes labels

There was a time when the VOX voter was portrayed as a posh kid from a private school and an expensive university. Now they are described as the opposite. Both labels cannot be true at once, and that should give pause for thought about the habit of classifying other people's electorates.

The 'educated' frame was used to equate VOX's populism with Podemos' and, in passing, to whitewash one's own. Today VOX fishes more in working-class neighbourhoods than in offices with degrees on the wall, and Podemos has taken another niche. The geometry of the vote shifted; the prejudice did not.

Is the VOX vote the least educated in Spain?

Not necessarily. Some point out that, measured by education level, the least educated vote is not VOX's. Others recall that voters of other parties also have their share of desk-bound civil servants who have never set foot in a company: formal education, zero real-world experience.

Contempt, to use the term in circulation, knows no party logos. The 'everyone is an idiot but me' attitude is the national sport, and those who practise it usually top the list.

Populism as a label of convenience

Promising to raise pensions and public salaries with no money in the till — is that populism or a programme? It depends on who signs it. The label is applied to the adversary and spared for one's own side. There lies the trick: it does not define a policy, it defines those who vote for it.

The question hanging in the air is whether any non-populist vote exists in Spain. If every party promises what it cannot pay for, the adjective loses all its edge.

Given this picture, the 'uneducated' label will keep working as a weapon rather than as analysis. And meanwhile, voters will keep voting according to what pinches their shoe.