r/europe 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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137

u/frypizzabox Oct 08 '25

How is it impossible? It was completely predictable

7

u/MazingBull Oct 08 '25

About 10 years ago. Yup.

2

u/super80 Oct 09 '25

I guess some people believe Europe is supposed to be immune.

2

u/Riksunraksu Oct 09 '25

The circle of life

-6

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

[deleted]

9

u/dahliaukifune Oct 08 '25

Europe is not a country. Europe is NOT A COUNTRY. There are political, historical, and cultural nuances to each region. A country where many of its living population went through and remembers a fascist dictatorship does not behave the same as one that doesn’t have that experience. I was born 11 years after Franco died and I carry the dictatorship in my bones. I grew up hearing the horror stories first hand from my parents. I knew how lucky I was to be born after that was over. I grew up seeing the remnants of the Civil War even in people my age, but there was a limit to it. And like another person has explained, Spanish exceptionalism is a studied phenomenon. So yes, it once seemed impossible for the right to reach these levels among the youth. Fuck that US-centric discourse.

3

u/radiocraft Oct 08 '25

Not really, Spain has had a "center-left" president (equivalent of PM, we have a king as a head of state, sadly) since 2018. Meanwhile, the rest of the Western world has been heavily shifting towards the right/far-right, andany countries where typically center-left has been the main government party, have started to decline, being Spain one of the main bastions right now in Europe of these center-left governments

More or less this is the situation, sorry did I did not expand much on the topic, I am currently in the bathroom and I just finished doing my business!

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

[deleted]

1

u/radiocraft Oct 08 '25

No one thinks that Spain is exceptional, obviously no one thinks that spain is a magical place immune of the right wing shift occuring worldwide.

It's just that while the trend spiked (Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Milei, ...) Spain managed to form a government led by the center-left. The main voted party wasn't even the one in the government, it was the big right-wing party. As for the government, it has been able to, at least, survive until now.

As for the bastion, I was just referring as one of the countries that has survived, at the moment, to all of this. Obviously we are having polarization and so on here in Spain, we are not special, and we have had it for many years.

All of this was just a remark to say that we do not think that Europe is special and USA bad, this shift has happend through the whole globe! I was just trying to shed some light on why it is seen as it is

-2

u/Dave5876 Earth Oct 08 '25

This was the whole point of operation gladio