Podemos praises anti-fascists who blocked Vito Quiles in Pamplona

Podemos cheers street violence against Vito Quiles

Ione Belarra and Irene Montero have turned a failed event in Pamplona into a point of no return. The Podemos secretary general wrote that anti-fascists did more to stop the hater Vito Quiles than the entire PSOE, including the Congress president. Montero went further: the anti-fa movement, full of young people, assumes the main civic duty of our time, making universities and streets safe spaces free from fascism. This message is not a loose opinion. It is a political line.

The trigger was an event by Vito Quiles at the University of Navarra campus that ended with a journalist from El Español being assaulted by radicals, according to the version published by that outlet. From there, the issue ceased to be a brawl and became a struggle over who can speak in public and who decides whose voice is silenced.

What peine at the University of Navarra campus

El Español's director, Pedro Jota, attacked the government after the assault on his reporter José Ismael Martínez. He spoke of a hunt, of a human pack launching itself at a young journalist fulfilling his constitutional duty, and of hooded thugs acting inside a university facility. The question he threw at Sánchez's executive remained without a public answer in the available material.

The version circulating from the other side was different. It spread that hundreds of young people organized in Iruñea (Pamplona) and that Quiles himself invented rumors to justify not showing up. The closure of a Canal Red program summarized it with a repeated phrase: thanks Navarra for reminding not only Vito Quiles that he will not pass, but all politicians in this country that neither with Quiles nor any fascist do we sympathize; they are silenced, they are kicked out of our neighborhoods.

There is a detail worth noting. Pablo Echenique, in the same medium, described the small displays of strength by the far-right minority among youth as a 'posh hobby', not as a political movement. In other words: for some it is the return of the lead years; for others, a gang of rich kids.

The left that doesn't collaborate and the one that does

Belarra pointed directly at Gabriel Rufián. She sent a message to a certain left that does not collude with Vito Quiles and lamented that measures taken in Congress had not worked. We still have left-wing people who whitewash him and laugh at his jokes, she said. The phrase has a recipient and a consequence: whoever does not applaud the strategy is excluded from the framework.

That framework is what most discomforts part of the natural electorate of the left. The recurring argument is economic before sarracena: if the left spends two decades fighting causes unrelated to its electoral base, the Spanish male worker ends up asking why he should support a discourse that does not mention his problems. It is not a marginal thesis. It explains why Vox grows where PSOE once governed.

The precedent nobody wants to repeat

The comparison with kale borroka (Basque urban guerrilla violence) appears again and again. A participant recalls that containers and buses were burned in downtown San Sebastián regularly, and that harsh legislation arrived and it ended in two afternoons. His conclusion is uncomfortable for both sides: it is a matter of political will, nothing else.

Others go further and talk about a rematch, a reissue of 1939, of people who incite the masses but do not risk their own skins. Historical memory works here as a warning and as a threat. And some maintain that the day the floodgates open, the response will not come from institutions or courts.

The business of calling everyone a fascist

The most repeated diagnosis is that the term fascist has stopped describing an ideology and has come to designate anything that does not align with the narrative. If anyone who does not think like them is a fascist, even if they are left-wing, the concept is emptied and only the excuse for violence remains. The practical consequence is what some denounce: neighborhood events are canceled due to threats, those who should not speak are prevented from doing so, and it becomes normalized that a mob decides who has the right to public space.

The open question is not who is right about Vito Quiles. It is whether a democracy can allow its parties to cheer on those who silence others, or if that is exactly what was written in the book nobody wants to read again.