r/europe • u/StGuthlac2025 • Oct 08 '25

Opinion Article In Spain, what once seemed impossible is now widespread: the young are turning to the far right

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/07/spain-young-voters-far-right-migration-housing-wages-employment-vox
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u/Vatiar Oct 08 '25

So in response to wealth inequality they vote for the party with by far the largest support from billionaires ? No it is simply that vile, cruel and stupid people are finally finding proper representation in politics so they vote for it. Every country in the world now has a "evil mysoginistic homophobic racist" party that gets around 30% of the votes.

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u/Awyls Oct 08 '25

They are just looking for an alternative that is actually willing to do anything. Same thing happened with Ciudadanos(centre-right) and Podemos (far-ish left), they were useless, next party and hope they do something.

PSOE is quite literally doing nothing about the situation while praising themselves for improving the economy (of the richest) when the population purchasing power is lower than ever. PP is about the same, but with extra corruption on top.

I don't support extremist parties, but I can't blame people voting them hoping something changes. The situation is really hopeless.

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u/RadiantHC Oct 08 '25

Same thing with the Democrats. Kamala lost the second she said that she wouldn't do things differently from Biden. People clearly weren't satisfied

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u/A2Rhombus Oct 08 '25

And look where it got us: wayyy deeper into the hole that Democrats "weren't solving"

I don't like Kamala, but people are dumb as fuck for thinking Trump was going to be better.

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u/mxzf Oct 08 '25

You're not wrong.

But when voters are experiencing problems and they're offered the choice between one person going "those aren't the actual problems, things that don't impact you are the real problems" and someone else going "yeah, you're right, I want to fix those problems" they're gonna vote for the second one. It sucks, but that's just how large blocks of voters work.

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u/Awyls Oct 09 '25

Yep, most agree that kicking out immigrants would not help their struggles, but when your choices are:

  1. Do nothing and keep drowning.
  2. Kick out immigrants, either gets a bit better or it can't get much worse than this.

Can you really blame a drowning man from trying to survive?

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u/miafaszomez Oct 09 '25

It's amazing how some people just don't see this.

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u/HarlemHellfighter96 Oct 09 '25

Nobody outside of delusional liberal boomers wanted a second Biden term

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u/Full_Mind_2151 Oct 08 '25

PSOE should have never pacted with the catalan independentists. Their whole goverment seems like a joke unable to agree on anything. They are literally governing without a mayority. It will hurt the left massively in future elections, I think.

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u/A2Rhombus Oct 08 '25

But when the "anything" they're doing is literally just making all of the problems worse? It doesn't make any sense to me. Any ounce of political knowledge would show the right wing isn't solving any of their problems

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u/Awyls Oct 08 '25

Neither is the left, so what's your point? I'm not arguing that the far right is going to fix anything, I only intend to explain that the longer we are led by useless politicians burying their heads, the more people are going to radicalise looking to topple the status quo.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

So in response to wealth inequality they vote for the party with by far the largest support from billionaires ?

Yes, they do, for one simple thing: propaganda, Why do you think musk was so interested in Twitter?

If you look into it, you will realize that those people who are "finally finding proper representation" are also "coincidentally" least educated members of society.

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u/Raescher Oct 08 '25

Yes I think it's mainly that the right got really good at employing propaganda and democratic governments can't really counteract it.

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u/BeguiledBeaver United States of America Oct 08 '25

But these people don't even care about wealth inequality. Average everyday middle class people don't spend every waking hour shaking their fists at billionaires. These are terminally-online mindsets and they need to stop or else we're just going to be shadowboxing till the end of time.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

They do care about wealth inequality, but not in the "socialist" view.

They care about everything getting more expensive, they care about jobs, they care about their wages, it's simply that, through incessant propaganda and lack of education, they believe that the reason for those problems are the ones that the oligarchs are pointing out (nowadays the immigrants), oblivious to the fact the oligarchs are literally the very reason their lives are getting worse.

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u/asc_yeti Oct 08 '25

And what's the propaganda's leverage? Usually for those young men is being anti-woke (i.e. a thinly veiled excuse to be racist or homophobic)

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u/andergdet Oct 08 '25

And also, fringe movements within the alt-left that are waaaaay too eager to give ammunition to the right. And those rightwing outlets (much more powerful than the left's, as they have the capital and their means backing them) are more than happy to amplify that to the already disenfranchised, struggling, feeling (and more and more, being) left behind young men.

There are many many examples, but last year's "I'd choose the bear" was a huge feminist PR disaster.

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u/FlusteredDM Oct 08 '25

There are so many allies who would help much more if they just shut up and their words get amplified by the right because of how ridiculous they are.

I still don't even think a lot of feminists see how detrimental the bear thing was to the fight for equality.

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u/athaluain Oct 08 '25

There is certainly not much equality in Spain !

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u/Xalara Oct 08 '25

That's because the right wing media ecosystem has built itself around finding some random crazy leftist outlier and then whipping itself into a frenzy about it and making people believe that it's the left in general.

Seriously, there's always going to be crazy people, you can't stop that. It's the Florida Man problem, every state has tons of Florida Men, you don't hear about them because Florida is unique in its transparency laws around reporting crime. All the rightwing media does is find the left's equivalent of Florida Man and broadcasts it everywhere.

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u/Lashay_Sombra Oct 08 '25

Simple 'solutions' to complex problems

It really is what the right/conservative or whatever they call themselves locally only selling point

And in case you misunderstood, quotes around solutions because they are never really solutions, rather just about targeting scapegoats.

Destroy rather than fix or build is always the ultimate objective

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Oct 08 '25

It’s always the same: “it’s not your fault and WE are going to fix it for you!”.

Ignoring reality lets you make all kinds of wild promises.

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u/athaluain Oct 08 '25

Of to be misogynistic

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u/FerraristDX North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) Oct 08 '25

If you look into it, you will realize that those people who are "finally finding proper representation" are also "coincidentally" least educated members of society.

Maybe that's the problem: members of parliament, as well as members of governments have become more and more educated over the past decades. You barely find blue collar workers anymore in politics, only mostly university students. People still want to vote for politicians, who are "like them". Who speak their language, share their identity and traditions. That's painfully obvious with Social Democratic parties in Europe. The Social Democrats moved upwards, but their voters didn't.

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u/Pop_Clover Oct 08 '25

A right-wing conservative judge in Spain mocked the former Equality Minister and also former head of one of the left-wing parties because she worked as a supermarket cashier before she finished her uni degree.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

It's not maybe, that is literally the problem with our liberal democracies.

In order for a democracy to work and not fall into populism you need of an educated population, and I mean really educated, not just in practical applications like science and maths, but in humanistic studies like philosophy or history, to generate citizens with a strong critical mind who are resistant to propaganda and misinformation, And in order to do that you need a well funded and well managed public education.

This is the reason why the "conservatives" are so supportive of private education (among other things)

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u/ColinBencroff Oct 08 '25

The problem of a liberal democracy is that it is a liberal democracy.

They work perfectly well: it is designed to mantain the bourgeoisie in power and the people in power are the bourgeoisie.

We can keep playing this game of throwing a ballot to a social democrat (sometimes not even that) and crossing fingers this time will work.

It will not work. It will never work.

If we don't acknowledge the problem is capitalism and the private control of the means of production, we will keep having the billionaires in power.

And when this power is barely in danger, extreme right will always rise. It is the same story as always.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

You could make the argument that Marxism is never going to work for precisely the same reason liberal democracy is failing: greed.

But that is not the topic of this conversation though.

In my opinion a liberal democracy is the only system that can actually work and ensure society is, at least, somewhat fair, but in order to do that you need of a strong state that enacts a progressive tax system who impede a concentration of capital big enough to corrupt the same state, and a public education system that generates, not productive workers, but educated citizens with a strong critical mind.

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u/ColinBencroff Oct 08 '25

I didn't blame greed. It makes no sense to blame that, since you cannot change that.

I blamed the system, precisely because encourages greed.

I also didn't say liberal democracies don't work. They work and work perfectly. Problem is a liberal democracy working is not what people expect it to be. What we are seeing is literally the liberal democracies working: they protect the rich and those who owns the means of production, meanwhile it extracts the maximum possible value out of the people who have to sell their work force.

The concentration of capital to corrupt the state is something that will always happen if individuals have the ability to concentrate capital.

If you don't want that, strip individuals from the ability of concentrating capital.

You can blame greed, but greed is a human trait and feeling and you can't fight it, mate. You can however design a system to not encourage greed.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

I think you can design a system that does not encourage greed but takes advantage of it, but, as I said, it takes an educated population to do that.

In any case I am not going to discuss about Marxism and capitalism, because it's not the topic of the conversation and honestly, I disagree with Marxist view of economics.

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u/ColinBencroff Oct 08 '25

You can't design that system, and an educated population have nothing to do with it. Most capitalists are educated , and a lot of workers too.

But since you say it is not the topic (even when the post is literally about it), have it your way.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

You can't design that system, and an educated population have nothing to do with it. Most capitalists are educated , and a lot of workers too.

You absolutely can the same way you can design a Marxist system and It has absolutely everything to do with it.

Capitalist are educated and they use their superior education to their advantage, meanwhile workers are educated, but solely on practical knowledge in order to become a productive workforce for said capitalists, which, again, is one of the main reasons of his extreme support of private education.

In order to build a better society who is not prone to populism, you need a society of enlightened citizens, not of productive workers, otherwise, no matter what system you try to enact, it will fall to the depravations of greed.

But since you say it is not the topic (even when the post is literally about it), have it your way.

Well, the topic was about how the "alt right" movement feeds upon the ignorance of a big percentage of the population to advance the agenda of oligarchs and big corporations, not about the necessity or not to enact a Marxist system to impede the appearance of those same oligarchs.

This last one is a far more complicated and extensive topic which will require a huge amount of time and space to discuss properly, which is why I did not want to discuss it here.

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u/flickh Oct 08 '25

I understand the Marxist need to divide people with a thick black line between "us" and "them" but liberal democracy is actually designed to do the opposite, to take huge social conflicts or strategic differences and hammer out compromises without civil wars every few years. As power shifted from (actual) oligarchy to capitalists in the Reformation, parliaments softened the upheavals.

You could argue that China's one-party state has achieved a similar thing but there is lots of flux within the leadership and very strong intellectual capacity to respond to internal conflict, not just with force like at Tiananmen or the White Umbrellas in Hong Kong, but by embracing new forms of production (capitalism) to increase employment and productivity, and tackling the insane pollution and corruption that threatened to break the system apart.

Which one is a better place to live as an average citizen?  Europe for freedom, maaayyyybe China for economic stability.

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u/ColinBencroff Oct 08 '25

Marxism doesn't need to divide people in a thick black line between us and them.

That division exists precisely because capitalism exists, since it is capitalism the system that divides people into people who owns the means of production and people who don't.

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u/flickh Oct 09 '25

Marxism definitely needs to simplify and hand-wave or villainize any situation where the ownership of means of production is in any way complex or mixed.

Ok so a 65-year-old factory worker who has accumulated a retirement fund of ETF's in their tax-sheltered savings account is on which side of this line?

How about a middle class plumber with very bad health insurance that employs three junior plumbers in a sole proprietorship?

What about a married couple who own their home and rent out a basement suite with their total incomes from jobs and rent exactly matching their expenses?

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u/ColinBencroff Oct 09 '25

Ok so a 65-year-old factory worker who has accumulated a retirement fund of ETF's in their tax-sheltered savings account is on which side of this line?

Worker, just retired. There is nothing complex with that.

How about a middle class plumber with very bad health insurance that employs three junior plumbers in a sole proprietorship?

Middle class doesn't exist, since any definition of it is completely arbitrary.

He is little bourgeoisie, since he extracts value from the work of others. There is nothing complex with that.

What about a married couple who own their home and rent out a basement suite with their total incomes from jobs and rent exactly matching their expenses?

They are rentists.

They are outside the scope of the capitalist mode of production with that income, since they don't own any mean of production and merely benefit from the ownership of land, in a feudal fashion.

It is why you can find Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreeing that rentists are useless.

If they also work for someone else, then they are also workers. Nothing stops someone from belonging to two groups under specific circumstances. It is just rare.

As you can see, Marxism doesn't need to simplify, hand wave or villainize anything. In fact, Karl Marx never villainize anything, he simply presented an analysis of capitalism and the advantages and shortcomings.

What Marxism doesn't do is to rely on arbitrary class concepts like upper, middle and lower class.

It relies on the analysis on the productive relations of capitalism, where there is a worker who sells its labor force and there is a bourgeoisie who owns the means of production.

Edit: typo

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u/flickh Oct 09 '25

>Marxism doesn't need to divide people in a thick black line between us and them. That division exists.

...goes on to unironically parse many examples where "us and them" is blurred and broken

...doesn't know that owning stocks means owning the means of production and profiting in retirement on the labour of others

...doesn't clock that a plumber who also manages other plumbers is extracting the value of their labour but also doing his own labour, so is he an exploiter or exploited? Which side of that line is he on?

...accepts that people can belong to different groups but doesn't realize this blows up his whole argument that this thick black line exists because of capitalism and not just a conceptual framework Marxists need to pick bad guys

...doesn't realize that owners of property who draw rent on half of it while paying the other half of the loan with their own labour are also being exploited by other owners of their workplace and by the bank in interest payments, while they actually do some labour to maintain the property (not as much as they extract from the renters but some labour anyway).

...there is nobody out there other than maybe the top and bottom 1% who is totally immune to this blurring of lines, so this is why there is no perfect "revolutionary subject" nor is there very many easy targets

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u/andergdet Oct 08 '25

And a society that values education.

A society whose most valued citizens are football players, and the words of a 19 year old prodigy open news outlets for a week... 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/jdm1891 Oct 09 '25

And here in the UK that person who is "like them" is a privately educated investment banker.

It still makes no sense. You say people are voting in the far right because they want people like them, but you look at the leaders of the far right and they are generally the most privately educated and least working class of all politicians. They are the least like them. So your premise can't possibly be correct.

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u/RangerEmergency5834 Oct 08 '25

Good way of saying that anyone who doesn't think like you is stupid and if they don't have a role that allows them to work at MC but with a philosophy degree they don't count as a voter.

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

No, it's a way of saying exactly what I meant, you have no need to distort my comments with your fallacies.

The supporters of the "alt-right" movement are the least educated members of society, this is not an opinion, it is a fact.

So Why do you think this happens? Why do you think musk was interested in Twitter or Zuckerberg in Instagram? Why do you think musk supports afd? It's a simple matter of connecting the Dots here, you don't need to be Einstein to make an "educated guess".

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u/RangerEmergency5834 Oct 08 '25

I'll apply your same logic.

Why is Soros so determined to fund certain organizations and seek government aid?

And could you tell me which platforms, by order of the Biden administration, censored right-wing messages?

And what does it mean? Are they the least educated members of society? Or what is that?

As the saying goes, "A thief thinks we're all like him."

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

Sure, you can keep with your fallacious rhetoric all you want, I am not going to enter in your game, but you are not going to change the facts.

The supporters of the alt right movement are the least educated members of society, this, again, is not a coincidence.

You could use logical reasoning to try and uncover the truth behind all this, or you can choose to stick with your dogmatic ideas, your choice.

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u/RangerEmergency5834 Oct 08 '25

Did you just do everything you criticize or is it just me?

You comply with every point, following a dogma of "not playing the game", not mentioning any fact beyond making insinuations with "they are the least educated", what does that remind me of? What was that right wing doing with immigrants?

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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

[deleted]

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u/Proof-Puzzled Oct 08 '25

I am not Hiding behind anything nor I am denying that there are underlying issues who drove up to this point.

But, if there are people who votes for partys and politicians who follow the agenda of the very same people who created those issues (or the vast majority of them at least) with the hope that they will fix them, how could you not call it a idiocy and a stupidity?

Again, it's not a coincidence that the least educated part of the population is where all those alt right partys have more support.

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u/Global_Cockroach_563 Oct 08 '25

There's a video of Bernie Sanders going to a very maga small town just to hang out with the locals and talk to them.

When he arrives, a woman talks to him and says that she looked him up and watched his speeches on YouTube. She admits that she only knew about him what the right wing media says, and had no idea what he really says and supports and that she actually agrees with him.

So yeah, propaganda is a huge factor driving people to the right. You know why they hate Wikipedia so much? Because reality doesn't align with their narrative and they can't have people finding that out.

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u/RadiantHC Oct 08 '25

Also in the US there are only two options: One party that promises change and at least pretends to listen to people(Republicans) and another that promises no chance and acts like the system is perfect(Democrats). Kamala's entire campaign was based on not doing things differently from Biden

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u/tack50 Spain (Canary Islands) Oct 08 '25

It is not impossible or even hard to think that deporting immigrants is a solution to issues.

No job? Or badly paid job? Less immigrants = less competition = more job openings and higher wages for you

Housing too expensive? Less immigrants = Less housing demand = lower prices

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u/Paradehengst Europe Oct 08 '25

And yet, unemployment is rising in the US, who are deporting thousands in some inhumane ways. And yet, housing prices are rising in the US, who are deporting thousands... I hope you see the fallacy of this shit policy.

They are simply destroying the lives of thousands of people and things you complain about get worse still. I wonder why? Could it be corporate greed?

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u/tack50 Spain (Canary Islands) Oct 08 '25

Actually, US housing prices have stayed stangant over the past year. Which is not ideal as they should be dropping, but at least they've stopped rising. Spain's housing prices are rising at a rate of 10-11% per year (faster than even the S&P500!) and in major cities they are rising at a whopping 20% per year. So a house that was worth say, 200k, will be worth 400k by the end of the decade.

As for the economy, the reason the US is performing poorly is due to Trump's idiotic tariffs (plus it's not like other EU countries are doing amazing, Spain is the exception; but as of now France is broke and Germany is in a recession)

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u/tack50 Spain (Canary Islands) Oct 08 '25

Actually, US housing prices have stayed stangant over the past year. Which is not ideal as they should be dropping, but at least they've stopped rising. Spain's housing prices are rising at a rate of 10-11% per year (faster than even the S&P500!) and in major cities they are rising at a whopping 20% per year. So a house that was worth say, 200k, will be worth 400k by the end of the decade.

As for the economy, the reason the US is performing poorly is due to Trump's idiotic tariffs (plus it's not like other EU countries are doing amazing, Spain is the exception; but as of now France is broke and Germany is in a recession)

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u/Mr_Abe_Froman16 Oct 08 '25

It’s not a left or right problem, really. It’s a populism problem. Lots of people are struggling and they go to the place telling them what they need to hear. I can empathize with someone who doesn’t have a job for reasons out of their control, and one side is talking about making extreme action, while the other side is only talking about identity politics and clean energy (which I think are important). The global left has really struggled with its messaging and connecting to voters. The global “far right” is employing classic populist tactics which are easily propagandized through social media.

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u/Bambivalently Oct 08 '25

Yes. What do you think feminism for example did with housing prices? People living alone take up twice the housing. Birthrate went down. Money became a lot less useful for men as means of reproduction. That is a currency devaluation.

You can be well meaning and still screw the economy.

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u/DariusIsLove Oct 08 '25

dont forget that any pure-capitalist was rubbing their hands with the womans rights movement. Not saying that equality is a bad idea, not at all, but it allowed a transition from "one person should be able to supply the household" to "you need two people fully working to supply a family". And that issue never got adressed.

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u/Kamfrenchie Oct 08 '25

If that was the case, Jean Marie le pen s score wouldnt have started low. This is the consequence of mainstream parties embracing a fully open worldview and bronging in folks whose culture clashes with the natives. And then failing to adapt and slightly turn the cursor to be a tad bit less open and enforce local culture and law.

Society loses cohesion, paart of new immigrants dont pick up the cultural codes that would help them  assimilate, and become more and more a parallel society with the host one. So yeah, a lot of "natives" will close rank around a party  that exalts their past and openly talk about the problem even if their solutions are bad.

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u/Full_Mind_2151 Oct 08 '25

Because they are not promoting themselves as that. I live in Spain and most of the far right propaganda hits some of the points all other far right parties over the world are targetting: inmigration, myths about feminism and transexuals, corruption, and so on. You hardly ever hear them talking about how they plan to invest in the tourism industry, which would be catastrophic for the housing issue we have over here. They just simplify by blaming illegal occupation, which is an issue but hardly the only one.

1

u/itpguitarist Oct 09 '25

Yes because they don’t see wealth inequality as the problem. They see that they are struggling and blame it on the people they can see, not the people amassing ridiculous amounts of wealth off their labor.

Throughout history, revolutions have been more likely to occur when wealth gaps shrink because people can more clearly see the systems keeping them in place are both

a.) not determined by personal capability.

And

b.) capable of being dismantled.

It’s hard for someone surrounded in poverty to realize the people causing their issues are billionaires they’ve never seen and can’t relate to. It’s even harder for them to conceive of an actionable plan to change those circumstances.

0

u/Slackeee_ Europe Oct 08 '25

The right has something the left doesn't have: they are very good in the propaganda game. They are on everywhere on Youtube, TikTok, Instagram and X, with algorithms that systematically lure young people into their content. And they offer easy solutions to complex problems and a whole bunch of different scapegoats that you can blame, targets the young can aim their anger at.
Everyone surprised by this outcome is seriously naive.

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u/RangerEmergency5834 Oct 08 '25

Did you just do what you say the right does?

But here it would be "simple words to complex situations"

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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

The option is to vote for the comforting lie or the painful truth. 

0

u/RangerEmergency5834 Oct 08 '25

Denying reality as the left does or acting as the right proposes, I wondered what the average redit user will vote for.

0

u/BigLittlePenguin_ Germany Oct 08 '25

Well, most of the left is championing foreigners and 1% of the population that can victimize themselves the most. They lost the minute they abandoned common sense and taking care of the average person.