Spain's Right-Wing Voter Shifts from Vox to Alvise Over Immigration

From Vox to PP and Back to Alvise: The Anti-Immigration Pivot

The initial premise is a twist many right-wing voters recognize: the author claims to have been among the first to warn against mass immigration, yet now warns against the "anti-immigration" stance itself. His thesis is that Vox has crossed a line with proposals such as deporting legal migrants who "do not integrate," a step he argues would be the prelude to a "good citizen card." The practical consequence, he writes, is a shift in voting behavior: first from the People's Party (PP) to Vox, and then to Alvise by elimination, because he refuses to waste his vote while Pedro Sánchez remains in La Moncloa.

What Vox Proposes and What Critics Say

The trigger for this shift is the party's drift in the Senate, where, according to this analysis, there is pressure to remove regularization by arraigo (the pathway through which many settled migrants consolidated their status). This is compounded by speeches from party officials about mass expulsions of people with legal residence, something that, according to the argument, even their European counterparts do not dare to formulate in such terms. The author's diagnosis is economic rather than sarracena: these forced departures would generate damage, tension, and polarization, ultimately giving wings back to the left.

The alternative he defends is more prosaic: cutting petty subsidies, withdrawing state grants to NGOs, combating the hiring of undocumented workers, and refusing to accept MENAs (unaccompanied foreign minors). With this, he argues, many migrants would leave voluntarily in the next crisis, with the added advantage of being able to blame the left for the disaster. The criticism is not of harshness, but of the showcase: much gesture and little real leverage.

The Hardest Counter-Offer: Expulsions, Contributions, and Age

Against that restraint appears a battery of much more aggressive measures. It proposes expelling irregulars, legal residents who commit any crime, however minor, those without work or benefits who request aid, imposing fifteen years of social security contributions to access citizenship, banning entry to those over 35 except for highly specialized profiles with high salaries, and reviewing naturalizations from the last twenty years. Those formulating these ideas estimate that this would eject 70% of the "riff-raff," a term the article does not reproduce.

The response from the original poster is a point-by-point correction. He accepts the expulsion of incivil, rejects automatic expulsion for lack of employment—arguing time must be given to find work or live supported by someone—and labels the age cutoff as arbitrary discrimination. Regarding the fifteen years of contribution, he directly asks what is understood by citizenship. The disagreement is not one of intensity, but of design.

The Calculation No One Wants to Put in Writing

In the economic section of the issue, a figure worth examining twice appears: it is stated that Spain has allocated more than 7 billion euros to Egypt to retain refugees so they do not reach Europe, and that a large part of this money comes from EU funds, i.e., from European taxpayers. The reading made of the Italian model is that it consists of transferring the problem to the neighbor, not solving it. The complete breakdown of that expenditure, showing who pays and who receives, provides the true measure of the business.

To this flank is added the argument that no government will execute mass expulsions because the shadow economy and certain sectors benefit from irregular labor. This is the most uncomfortable thesis of the whole: hard rhetoric serves to capture votes, not to change anything. If that is true, the voter demanding firmness is buying a product that is never delivered.

Why Useful Voting Has Become a Labyrinth

The thread leaves a paradox difficult to close. The author wants to oust Sánchez, does not want to vote for Vox due to its drift, sees no capacity for Alvise to win, and rules out abstention. Each option has a cost: voting for Vox legitimizes a discourse he considers harmful, voting for the PP may be insufficient, voting for Alvise may be wasting the vote. And in the middle, the suspicion that the party promising an iron fist has become something else.

The discussion stays exactly there, unresolved. There is no data that closes the dilemma because the dilemma is not arithmetic, but one of trust. And trust, in politics, is not measured by polls.