Isolate Vox, mission impossible

They called it cordon sanitaire, an epidemiological metaphor that not even many of its supporters like and that is already part of European political jargon.

In Spain you will not see such a thing.

The policy of isolating the extreme right by blocking the government from the institutions, as has been practiced for years in France or more recently in Germany, does not find great supporters here, neither among the traditional right nor among the left.

In Spain the division of blocks commands.

On the right, he does not see Vox as a more extremist threat than the forces with which the PSOE agrees.

And on the left they say that it is the PP that should take the first step and renounce the support of the extreme right in Andalusia, Madrid and Murcia.

Beyond purely partisan reasons,

The debate timidly opened after the elections in Castilla y León, where Vox is already negotiating its entry into a government headed by the PP, and it was settled very quickly.

Neither the PSOE, apart from some isolated opinions, is willing to lend a hand to the popular so as not to be at the mercy of the extreme right, nor has the PP ever asked it.

In United We Can, the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, was hardly heard to speak in favor of a “democratic cordon”, without going into more details.

Pablo Iglesias maintains that PP and Vox are already comparable and there is no cord that is worth.

With a different analysis, Íñigo Errejón has also rejected it: “Vox would like nothing more.

When the whole world is cursing politics, to make someone cursed is to give them the perfect image”.

Public opinion is divided:

47% in favor and 42% against, according to a 40dB poll.

for the country.

Those of Errejón are “strategic” reasons, as defined by the consultant and former socialist leader Eduardo Madina, a strong supporter of the opposite position, which he justifies first of all for “ethical” reasons: “Vox has approaches that are incompatible with many of the forms of life currents in Spain.

About women, homosexuals, immigrants... They want to remove them from the field of equality, end their rights.

That is the heart of Vox's ideology and it represents a public danger of the first magnitude because it threatens the fundamental element of democracy, pluralism.

Not only must we not let them govern, we must make it clear that voting for them is useless.

On the other plane, the strategic one, Madina believes that the examples of France or Germany show that the cordon works.

From another ideological position, José María Lassalle, professor, liberal and former militant of the PP, also defends isolation.

“It must be raised intelligently, as a work of political pedagogy that highlights the contradictions of Vox, the ideas that question our model of coexistence.

But that should not mean condemning them to ostracism, or anathematize them, but rather visualize how the forces in defense of democracy act.

For Lassalle, the "authoritarian pressure" that Vladimir Putin has launched on Europe and his connections with the western extreme right urge to adopt such a solution.

In the orthodoxy of the current PP, former minister José Manuel García-Margallo defends that the pacts with Vox are as legitimate as those that the PSOE has signed on the left.

With the independentistas and also with Unidas Podemos, a "clearly anti-system force" with positions close to "illiberal democracy."

“As long as the PSOE continues

and do not return to traditional social democracy, the best solution will not be possible, a great coalition with the PP that in two or three years tackles the institutional and economic reforms that the country needs”.

Margallo lists the positions of Vox that he sees as unacceptable: its denial of gender-based violence, its discourse of "xenophobic overtones" against immigration, its rejection of autonomies and the UN sustainable development agenda or its idea of ​​a "European of the homelands”.

Even so, he believes it is possible to govern with them, at least in autonomous communities, where management "has a much smaller ideological component" and provided that "a very detailed program is drawn up that does not cross the red lines" of the PP's postulates.

Madina refutes this comparison between antagonistic extremisms: "Podemos does not propose to exclude anyone and Vox wants to do it with 50% of Spaniards."

The historian Julián Casanova abounds: "There is no extreme struggle where communism is on the other side, because communism is not a threat in Europe today."

On the effectiveness of laces, there are disparate examples.

Víctor Lapuente, Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, appeals to the country where he lives: “For many years in Sweden there was a very strong cordon sanitaire and it worked in the short term, but not in the long term.

Now the extreme right is stronger than in any other Nordic country, with 20% in some polls.

Lapuente is one of those who are inclined to consider isolation detrimental.

With the exception of him: "It is one thing not to block the path of institutions and another to allow them to cut civil and political rights of minorities."

The political scientist leaves another note, that this extreme right cannot be equated with fascism, shared by Casanova.

“It is a new extreme right, they are no longer those nostalgic for the Franco regime of the Spanish Transition or the forces that after World War I were introduced through the electoral system to destroy it,” says the professor of Contemporary History.

What groups like Vox do do is "break some of the values ​​of European society."

Casanova notices it in their attitudes against feminism or when "they put the country and the nation above the people, excluding those who do not belong to them."

Rather than stringing them together, the historian advocates "not normalizing them."

And he regrets that in Spain the opposite has happened, "it has been treated by a large part of the media as just another democratic force."

For Casanova, the core of the problem is that the PP must face a "question of identity", if it acts in the "tradition of the democratic right" or "thinks that Vox is not an anomaly, that it is a brother party that is born from them ”.

PP voters are in this idea: 70% believe that Vox should be treated as one more.

Also Ignacio Urquizu, political scientist and socialist mayor of Alcañiz (Teruel), affects "the two faces of the PP".

One is that of the "rational" party, which focuses on "management policies" and which would be embodied by its future leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

And the other, the one that is carried away by "the emotional and the identity", characteristics of Vox that, according to him, has "mimicked" Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Urquizu does not clearly decide between the advantages and disadvantages of the cordon sanitaire.

He even believes that Vox, without cadres or management experience, can pay for its entry into the Government of Castilla y León, as has already happened to similar forces in other countries.