ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 investigates the ways in which the territorial issue has shaped the behaviour of the right-wing parties in Spain in recent years, thereby mirroring the approach taken in Chapter 5 on the evolution of the left. It considers the period up to and including the April 2019 general election and its immediate aftermath. Perceptions on the furthest right that the conservative PP, the longstanding ‘broad church’ right-wing party, was not clamping down hard enough on the pro-independence drive in Catalonia contributed to the emergence of challengers on the right. The height of the Catalan crisis, in the weeks and months following the illegal referendum of 1 October 2017, pushed the centre-right Ciudadanos further to the right (or at least to favour right-wing alliances), as well as providing a key window of opportunity for the far-right Vox to gain ground. Vox also used the traction it gained from this window of opportunity to revive other traditional elements of Spanish ultra-conservatism, such as opposition to gender equality and immigration. While the appeal of such ultra-conservative ideas remained reduced in Spain, both the PP and Ciudadanos proved more willing than most mainstream right-wing parties to ally with a far-right party such as Vox where necessary, due first and foremost to their similar positions on the Catalan predicament. This contributed to the increasing normalisation of far-right ideas in political discourse that had previously been stigmatised in the country.
