Spain election: I'll vote for VOX as a vote of confidence, but it may be the last time

Voting for VOX while holding your nose, with an expiry date

Some votes are cast with enthusiasm, others are deposited the way one signs a rental contract with an exit clause. The opening post in this discussion is of the second kind: a VOX voter who announces his ballot for the next election, but accompanies the gesture with a list of conditions and a none-too-subtle warning. If the party does not change course, this will be the last time it can count on his support.

The starting thesis is less an endorsement than a truce. The argument is that VOX is today the only party representing part of the electorate that identifies with patriotism and with a hard-line reading of the country's problems, and that in the current situation the alternative is "them or no one." The vote, therefore, is presented as the lesser evil or the only possible good, never as full conviction.

What VOX must do to earn his vote again

The bulk of the argument is a list of mistakes that, in the voter's view, the party carries and must correct if it ever takes office. The first is the contagion of the political style imported from the United States: the claim is that Trumpism and its Latin American offshoots are dead in the West, and that copying that register —comebacks, TikToks, pettiness— is doing politics badly. The criticism is not aimed at the ideology but at the form: governing nations requires something else.

The second reproach targets international alignment. Unconditional support for Israel is described as a generational error of origin, and the dichotomy whereby the right must defend one side because the left defends the other is rejected. The conclusion is that neither side is an ally of Spain and that foreign bandwagoning yields no national benefit.

The third point is the most delicate and introduces the most tension: immigration policy. The argument is not satisfied with the rhetoric against illegal immigration, which it takes for granted, and demands going one step further: a policy that halts what it describes as ethnic replacement and closes the door on non-European immigration. This is the part of the text that generates the most division in the replies and that marks the distance between the voter and the party he intends to vote for.

The vision of the country lurking in the background

Beneath the criticism there is a project. The voter calls for a patriotic party, with less state in the superfluous and more in the essential, low taxes, defence of property, natalist policies, rearmament, reindustrialisation and an infrastructure plan including nuclear power, reservoirs and water transfers. To this are added a cultural and aesthetic project, and an idea of reforestation and care for the land. The condition is that everything be framed as long-term national pragmatism and not as an exportable ideology.

The majority response in the discussion does not rebut that programme, but takes it as sound and doubts that VOX is the vehicle to implement it. Several contributors agree that the party has served to shift the frame of what can be said —it is claimed that the Overton window has moved to the right for the first time in decades— and that this merit alone justifies the vote. Others add the floor logic: first it must become normal for there to be a right to the right of the PP (Spain's main conservative party), and only then can a more radical proposal be demanded.

Urgency versus distrust

Against that gradualism stands the pressure of the calendar. Some argue that this election is the last chance and that a new mandate for the current bloc would consolidate a system that would be hard to reverse. The watchword is tactical voting, whether for VOX or the PP, to oust the government. At the opposite extreme, several voices reply that the system cannot be fixed through elections and that voting only serves to slow the decline.

The result is a discussion that pits not supporters against detractors of VOX, but different degrees of scepticism. The vote of confidence with an expiry date that opens the exchange sums up the mood well: people vote, but they warn. And the warning has an addressee, conditions and a clock.