During this trip, I met a great number of people who vote for Vox, admire Santiago Abascal, and are fans of Trump and Nayib Bukele. Most are half my age. These were conversations that arose spontaneously with grocery clerks, store cashiers, cab drivers, Uber drivers, and an occasional young adult child of a colleague.
[Yes, I feel enormously more sociable in Spain than anywhere else. I initiate a lot of conversations, and it’s not even a language thing. Yesterday, for example, a had a 30-minute conversation in German with a guy from Stuttgart who’s lived on Spain for 31 years. And then people will say that Duolingo doesn’t work.]
Going back to my original subject, yes, I encountered raging right-wingerism in Spain. People slide into the political part of the conversation cautiously. Nobody walks around announcing, “I’m right-wing. Let’s be right-wingers together.” Everybody tests the ground before launching into their spiel.
“It always makes me glad to see people put up the rojigualda [the Spanish flag]. You are from America, I heard everybody really respects the American flag there. It’s important to be patriotic.”
“Did you see the October 12 ceremony? It was so beautiful until that piece of shit [the Socialist Prime Minister] spoiled everything.”
“Say what you will, but in many case Santi Abascal [the leader of the right-wing Vox] is right.”
“Sure, Trump is totally crazy. But is he all that wrong?”
“I really hope Pedrito [the Socialist Pedro Sánchez] crashes in his stupid car and dies. Did you see the princess? Even she’s mocking him.”
“I don’t think Bukele is all bad, do you?”
The moment you give the slightest indication that you are receptive, people launch on a right-winger tirade of the century.
This might be a class issue. I avoided all colleagues except the Ukrainian one and only talked to working-class people. On the way back to the airport, the Uber driver, a very young father of a baby boy, couldn’t get the toll pass to function. A toll worker in her sixties came up. We all immediately became friends, and the representatives of the different generations of Spaniards engaged in an excited tongue-lashing of “those Socialist shits.”
The young people in Europe are angry. Forget young. I haven’t met anybody under the age of fifty who’d be rah-rah for leftism and for the European status quo of infinity migration, speech codes, and the lack of economic protectionism.
I come to Spain all the time. This is a huge change. Fifteen years ago everybody was very lefty, especially the 20-year-olds. And everybody said contemptuously “el Estado español” [the Spanish state] instead of Spain. Now I feel one could get socked in the face for disrespecting the country publicly like this.
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