The leader of VOX, Santiago Abascal, on the left, with the general secretary of Solidarity, Rodrigo Alonso, during the rally on May 1 in Madrid.A.
Perez Meca (Europa Press)
Labor Day is not for Vox.
Since he almost filled the Murcia bullring on February 12, Santiago Abascal has staged massive rallies throughout Spain, but this Monday he has only gathered several hundred followers in Madrid's Chamberí square: 2,500, according to the organizers;
and 700, according to the Government Delegation.
The assistants have occupied the pedestrian zone of the roundabout, but they have not invaded the street of Santa Engracia or the side road, so traffic has not been cut, although several police vans were in the area with a preventive nature.
Vox has taken advantage of the celebration of May Day —or the festival of San José obrero, as several speakers have pointed out, underlining its religious nature— to attack class unions.
In the square where the socialist leader and Minister of Labor of the Republic Francisco Largo Caballero was born, Abascal has accused the Comisiones Obreras and UGT of "crime syndicates", he has reproached them for not having "lifted a finger" against the Executive of Pedro Sánchez and has warned them that, if Vox enters the Government after the next general elections, "it is going to put them in their place" and it is going to "take away their subsidies, as it has done in Castilla y León".
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Trying to end the class unions is one of the primary objectives of Solidaridad, the union arm of Vox and theoretical organizer of the rally this Monday, although its general secretary, Rodrigo Alonso, only intervened as an opening act for the president of Vox.
In recent weeks, Solidarity has launched a campaign against the leaders of the UGT and CC OO, whom it contemptuously dismisses as "comegambas", and has distributed leaflets in front of the union headquarters with activists disguised as crustaceans.
In addition, it has appeared in the legal case opened for the diversion of money from the Salary Guarantee Fund (Fogasa) by a former employee of UGT Madrid and has requested that the socialist union go from witness to being investigated.
Despite criticizing CC OO and UGT for their adherence to the Marxist theory of class struggle, Abascal has made it his own, reformulating it, to ensure that the real struggle is not between rich and poor or employers and workers, but between the class of the “globalist oligarchs”, made up of “billionaires,
lobbies
and mafias”, on the one hand, and “the honest working people”, on the other.
With the first would be all the parties, except his, as well as unions, employers, "subsidized media" and "useful idiots";
and with the second, only Vox.
Once the wave of Catalan nationalism has subsided, the 2030 Agenda (which includes the sustainable development goals approved by the United Nations General Assembly) has become Vox's great scarecrow.
Without explaining what points of said agenda it disagrees with, the ultra party attributes all the evils to it, from the relocation of companies to the imposition of a supposed diet based on "synthetic meat, insects and worms".
Vox and Solidaridad - the union does not make its accounts public - have covered the facade of a building in the center of Madrid with a gigantic canvas that caricatures the leaders of all the other political forces, from EH Bildu to the PP, united by their commitment to the 2030 Agenda.
Abascal has warned of the risk that, in the next elections, the PP will take "patriotic and conservative votes" (which in previous elections went to Vox) to later end up accepting "the red lines of the left";
that is to say, that he does not agree with his party.
Alonso, for his part, has excused those who in the past made "the mistake" of voting for the Popular Party.
Among them, it is assumed that he himself, since for eight years he was a PP councilor in a town in Almería.
“Drown the Spanish”
With less than a month to go before elections are held in more than 8,000 municipalities and 12 autonomous communities, to which his party is running, Abascal has attacked the autonomies, saying that they have only served to "drown the Spanish, sinking any possibility of prosperity”, and so that “politicians live above their means”.
It so happens that the general secretary of Solidarity is a deputy spokesperson for Vox in the Andalusian Parliament, from which he earns more than 6,000 net euros per month.
One of the most chanted shouts at the rally was "National Solidarity!", alluding to the union's name and its commitment to "national priority", which discriminates against foreign immigrants, even if they are legal, compared to Spaniards.
"Properly understood charity begins with oneself," Abascal has justified.
Solidaridad Nacional was the name of the newspaper of the vertical union in Barcelona under the Franco dictatorship, which was published in the workshops seized from Solidaridad Obrera, the newspaper of the anarcho-syndicalist central CNT.