The Vox leader did not wait last Sunday for the vote count in Portugal to congratulate his Chega counterpart. “Congratulations to our Portuguese neighbors and friends. Congratulations André Ventura for this great result,” wrote Santiago Abascal on the social network In the presence of his Spanish guest, the Portuguese politician announced that, if he won the elections, he would not let the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, visit Lisbon this April 25, half a century following the carnation revolution. . “If you insist on entering,” he added, “you go to the dungeon. “It won’t be something new for him.” Nor, he added, would he like to see Pedro Sánchez; although he might not prevent his passage, being a citizen of an EU country.
Also the general secretary of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, congratulated himself last Monday on the “success” of Chega, which has multiplied its seats by four. The Portuguese ultras have achieved what their Spanish counterparts did not achieve on 23J: that the moderate right needs them, and that is enough for them, to complete an absolute majority. It remains to be seen if the leader of the Democratic Alliance, Luís Montenegro, keeps his promise not to govern with them, something that Feijóo has not done in Spain.
Chega’s promotion is not the first joy that Abascal has had away from home. On December 10, he traveled to Buenos Aires as a personal guest at the inauguration of the new Argentine president, Javier Milei. After the local elections on May 28, he went to Budapest to meet with the Hungarian Prime Minister, the ultra-conservative Viktor Orbán. In November, he met in Rome with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom he saw once more a month later at Atreju, the Fratelli d’Italia youth festival, where he chatted with the owner of the X network ( formerly Twitter) Elon Musk. And, following the recent fiasco in the Galician elections, he went to Washington, where he spoke before the convention of the most right wing of the Republican Party (CPAC) and met with the 45th president of the United States, and candidate to become the 47th, Donald Trump.
The successes of its foreign allies partially compensate for the poor results that Vox has achieved in the last elections in Spain and, above all, give it courage in the face of the gloomy prospects that the polls predict in the next elections with the polls: the 21st. April in the Basque Country and May 12 in Catalonia.
“If the question is whether Vox has more of a future or more of a past, I think that is answered by what is happening around us around the world,” Abascal responded on January 26 at COPE. “Parties like Vox are having triumphs. It has happened in Italy, in Nordic countries, Holland, France… Those who are disappearing in many places in the West are those of the center-right and social democrats,” he concluded. In his opinion, if Vox were an exclusively Spanish phenomenon, one might believe in its disappearance, but it responds to a global phenomenon whose shock wave will end up reaching Spain, even if it is delayed, as happened in 2018, when the ultra ghost burst into Andalusia. who had been traveling through Europe for decades.
Abascal’s trips abroad “have managed to put Spain in the international spotlight,” in Garrriga’s words. Although not always for the better. It was in Buenos Aires, in an interview with the Clarín newspaper, where he said that “someday the Spanish people will want to hang Pedro Sánchez by his feet,” although he later clarified that it was a metaphor. And the plenary session of the Salamanca City Council, with the support of the PP, disapproved of the Vox leader for stating in the United States that the university of Fray Luis de León and Miguel de Unamuno has become “a machine of censorship, coercion, indoctrination and antisemitism.”
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His attacks on the ecclesiastical hierarchy have gone more unnoticed, of which he said, also in Washington, that “they are not doing everything possible, in the schools dependent on the Church, to prevent this type of lobbies [LGTBI] disturb minors.” One of the stars of the ultraconservative conference in which Abascal participated was the traditionalist prelate Joseph Strickland, whom Pope Francis dismissed as bishop of Tyler (Texas).
Despite the importance it gives to its international alliances, Vox is the only one of the major parties that does not have a person responsible for foreign relations. After the resignation of his former spokesperson in Congress, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, last August, no one has replaced him as deputy secretary of International Relations. Sources from the ultra party assure that Abascal has entrusted this task to Disenso, his foundation.
Although Abascal, president of both, maintains that Vox and Disenso are the same, legally they are not. The leadership of the ultra party elected the members of the foundation’s first board of trustees in 2020 but, from that moment on, it is the trustees themselves who decide, by co-option, who joins its leadership. Abascal is a patron for life, so he would continue in Disenso even if he stops being president of the group. Furthermore, Vox affiliates do not have any control over the accounts of the foundation, to which the ultra party has transferred 10,796,138 euros in five years (5.4 million between 2020 and 2022 according to the audited accounts; and 5.3 million in 2023 and 2024, according to their budgets).
Disenso’s relationship with its American counterpart Heritage Foundation has been the way for Abascal to intervene on the 23rd at the CPAC convention, according to the sources consulted, who deny that Vox had to pay for its leader to be one of the speakers or to meet with Trump, although fundraising is one of the fundamental objectives of this type of event.
According to the information provided by Vox, Abascal traveled to Washington at the head of a delegation made up of the director of Disenso, Jorge Martín Frías; the director of the Madrid Forum, the Salvadoran Eduardo Cader; the Brazilian Ernesto Araujo, Bolsonaro’s former foreign minister: and the MEP Hermann Tertsch. None of them are part of the party leadership, but the first three work in the foundation and the last one is part of ECR, the European Parliament group where Vox sits.
However, the international policy of the ultra party is not supported only by the foundation but by a private company, Tizona Comunicación, owned by Gabriel Ariza – son of Julio Ariza, boss of El Toro TV, the former Intereconomía, Vox’s unofficial channel. – and Kiko Méndez-Monasterio, Abascal’s right hand. Gabriel Ariza has accompanied Abascal to the United States. Argentina and Israel, where he visited a kibbutz attacked by Hamas and met with members of the Netanyahu Cabinet: among other trips. In Buenos Aires, the owner of Tizona sat next to Abascal in a reserved meeting with the Hungarian Orbán and his closest collaborators. Ultra party sources attribute to Tizona Abascal’s interview with former Fox News star, commentator Tucker Carlson, who would later star in a controversial interview with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president justified the invasion of Ukraine.
The ultra party has not revealed how much it pays Tizona. The Court of Accounts, in its audit of Vox’s accounting in 2019, criticized that a training that is financed with public funds paid more than half a million euros to a private company for “generic services” in contracts without advertising or competition. In its allegations, Vox responded that this company carries out “political advisory tasks whose nature in the invoice is difficult to specify” and justified the hand-picked awards because “the service received is inseparable from the person and would not be expected from another service provider.” market”. That is, a personal relationship, rather than a business one.
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