The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, recognized at the end of July, in an interview with the Argentine website Infobae, the sympathy that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, arouses among his followers, while trying to distance himself from him.
“It is true that there is some confusion among the electorate that we may have […] because Putin is a character who positions himself against the stupidities of the left.
But hey, just because someone is right about something doesn't make them good at everything else.
Of course he does not make him good for our interests, ”he assured.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, all the leaders of European extreme right-wing parties have juggled to try to forget their praise for Putin, who is not only united in many respects by his ultra-nationalist ideology and ultra-conservative morality, but also also a political complicity greased generously with rubles.
In their eagerness to distance themselves from the Kremlin, most of these leaders have remained silent in the face of the assassination of Daria Dugina, daughter of Putin's ideological figurehead Alexander Dugin.
One of the few exceptions has been the deputy secretary of the Vox Organization in Barcelona, Jordi de la Fuente, who a few hours after the attack wrote a laconic “Rest in Peace, warrior” on his Twitter account.
The message was almost immediately deleted from social networks, but it was recorded by Xavier Rius Sant himself, author of
Els ultras són aqui
("The ultras are here"), a detailed investigation of the far-right circles in Catalonia.
Tweet published from Jordi De la Fuente's account on Sunday after the murder of Daria Dugina.
The tweet from the strong man of the Vox apparatus in Catalonia might not refer to the daughter of Putin's head philosopher, if it were not because De la Fuente is a declared admirer of his.
In October 2016, he presented Dugin's book
Eurasia Project: theory and praxis
at the House of Russia in Barcelona , of which he himself wrote the prologue.
The work is a justification for the reconstruction of the tsarist empire, presenting Moscow as the Third Rome, the sentinel of traditional Christian values against the decline of the West.
At the presentation of the book, when the annexation of Crimea (2014) had already taken place, De la Fuente defended that the Russian intervention in Ukraine had to be "measured with a filter that is not ours".
“They [the Russians] consider that Ukraine is their backyard, that Ukraine has suffered a series of coup attempts culminating in the Orange Revolution and finally Maidan to topple governments that could be more in line with Moscow's foreign policy. and impose regimes that can be in favor of the EU, of this globalist structure.
Russia has had to intervene there,” he concluded.
Before joining Vox, De la Fuente - now the right-hand man of Abascal's man in Catalonia, Ignacio Garriga - was a leader of the Republican Social Movement (MSR), a small neo-Nazi group whose list he led in the 2011 elections, and of Platform for Catalonia (PxC), a xenophobic formation that had a strong municipal presence.
Dugin's theories have had a great echo in Spanish neo-Nazi circles, with figures such as Ernesto Milà or Juan Antonio Llopart and the CEDADE association;
and they have also been welcomed, among others, by José Javier Esparza, star journalist of El Toro TV, Vox's unofficial television, who assured that "Indo-European ideology could largely reverse European cultural decadence."
The Russian ideologue met with some of them during his trips to Spain in 1994 and 2017.
Dugin himself wrote the introduction to the Spanish edition of his book
The Fourth Political Theory
(a reactionary ultranationalism that he presents as overcoming liberalism, communism and fascism), in which he called on the Spanish to rebel "against the very roots of modernity” and mixed the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo with the execution of Lorca to vindicate the black Spain that worships death.
The book was published in 2012 by Ediciones Nueva República, the publisher of De la Fuente's group.
Abascal, who counts among his closest advisers the writer Fernando Sánchez Dragó, admirer of Putin and patron of the Vox foundation, and among his political allies Marion Maréchal Le Pen, granddaughter of the Founder of the National Front, well connected with the Kremlin, suspended at the last moment in 2018 a meeting with Putin "out of prudence", he explained.
He is now trying to erase any ties between his party and Moscow and prefers to identify himself with Giorgia Meloni, the best-placed candidate in the polls for the Italian elections on September 25.
Vox leaders are convinced that Meloni, president of the Group of Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) of the European Parliament, in which the ultra-Spanish MEPs also sit, will invite Abascal to his electoral campaign, as he did in the Andalusian regional elections, when he invited her one weekend to participate in a rally in Marbella (Málaga).
However, Meloni, who presents herself as a "conservative" and flees from the far-right label, no longer seems so interested in linking her image to that of Abascal: in the video that she broadcast in Spanish this summer she cited the North American Republicans, the British Conservatives and the Israeli Likud, a way of associating themselves with three parties with a long democratic pedigree (even though none belong to their group in the European Parliament) and ward off accusations of anti-Semitism.
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber