Spain's PP and VOX on hate speech laws: repeal or keep them?

Spain's PP and VOX on hate speech laws: repeal or keep them?

The question that opens the discussion is uncomfortable and cuts to the bone: if the PP and VOX take power in Spain, will arrests over offensive tweets, songs or hate crimes keep happening, or will those laws stay untouched? The initial framing is posed with a smirk: if the right wins, will there be freedom of speech, or will the far right arrest people for jokes, anti-feminist messages and Francoist propaganda? And it adds the tagline many are waiting for: will they scrap the Ministry of Equality, which they call «feminista radical», or keep it and do nothing?

The answer that dominates the conversation is the most cynical and, at the same time, the most consistent with recent experience. PP and VOX are not the same as the PSOE, but neither are they the opposite: the claim is that everything will stay the same. The underlying argument is that the tools for repressing speech are left alone because they serve whoever is in power, and that the administrative machinery survives changes of colour.

Some point out that left-wing measures were already repealed once with an absolute majority, and that the same script is likely to repeat itself. Against that, distrust is aimed at the PP's leader: he is accused not of refusing to repress criticism, but of sending people to prison for it. The irony about his health record and his regulatory zeal — a regional law struck down by the Constitutional Court — serves to cast doubt on whether he is the free speech champion some hope for.

The harshest diagnosis is not about repealing, but about administering antiestéticar. One current proposes targeting critics for a year so they know what it's like to live in antiestéticar, and then shutting down the whole apparatus: repealing the article of the Incivil Code, abolishing the agency and cutting off subsidies to those who live off it. It is the radical version of the argument: not applying the law is not enough, it has to be dismantled.

The underlying suspicion is that censorship does not start with the PP or VOX, but is already underway. One autonomous community is cited where a Franco-style censorship is said to have been reinstated, as the latest example of free speech being curtailed from power, whatever its colour. The initial question, then, is turned on its head: the problem is not what they would do, but what they are already doing.

The doubt remains over whether the Ministry of Equality disappears or stays. Nobody can say for sure. The conversation ends where it began: with the feeling that the free speech narrative is an electoral ornament and that the structures of control outlast the programmes.