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On Sunday, February 14th, VOX managed to surpass, in the elections in Catalonia, both in votes and seats, the historic Partido Popular (PP). Now VOX will lead the opposition in Catalonia. The phenomenon of new right-wing movements that move away from what in Spain is known as the “derechita cobarde” (coward right) is repeated forcefully in different parts of the world. The popular right demands that its politicians, once elected, do not betray their voters by governing like the left.
El American spoke to Spanish journalist and Member of the European Parliament Hermann Tertsch about the rise of this new right and movements like VOX or MAGA that arise in rejection of a deformed and cowardly right.
VV: VOX just got a victory in the elections held in Catalonia last Sunday, February 14th, surpassing for the first time in votes and seats the Popular Party (PP), therefore it is going to lead the opposition in Catalonia. What is your analysis of what happened in Catalonia?
Hermann Tertsch: What has happened in Catalonia is very important, it is historic, it is very meritorious for VOX because it has been a resounding success in absolutely tremendous conditions of harassment and violence against this party to get eleven seats in the Catalan Parliament in these circumstances, where the media and the whole environment is absolutely overwhelming, without fissures to pander to separatists and the left, VOX’s heroism was displayed in every corner of Catalonia, being attacked, being stoned, being threatened everywhere, with all kinds of vilification and defamation, well, it has earned them enormous merit.
It has the political value that it has demonstrated, a message of defense of the Spanish nation without fissures, without appeasing the separatists or their accomplices in the Spanish left, it is a policy that has a project and a future in the regional Parliament and, of course, that has far surpassed both the Popular Party and Ciudadanos, which have made a policy, let us say, of surrendering, following the tradition of the Spanish right, looking for votes on the right to then apply policies and solutions that only favor the left or that are really ideological projects of the left.
In this sense, within the total drama of the Catalan politics -because it has gone on for almost half a century- we have been allowing for forty years that a totalitarian and anti-Spanish project such as separatism, and the leftist separatism that prevails in Catalonia, to use the money of the state to generate division, to educate and indoctrinate youth in hatred, and the result of so many years of allowing, of tolerating the intolerable, have brought us here, within that general tragedy that explains that the three main parties are the party of Sánchez, the party of the coup leader Junqueras, and the party of the fugitive and no less coup leader and criminal Puigdemont. Within the drama of Catalan politics there is finally a ray of light and this ray of light is a Spanish national democratic project that restores freedom.
We are talking about a regime that forbids citizens to be educated in their own language, Spanish is persecuted in education, those who label their businesses in Spanish are mistreated, every day there are fewer freedoms and every day it is more burdensome and strangling, we are talking about leftist anti-Spanish nationalist supremacism.
VV: What you mentioned about those parties that capture the votes of the right but that in reality when they go to govern what they do is to apply many things from the left, that disappointed popular right is something that, I think, is not only happening in Spain, but in many parts of the world. It is for example what is also happening here in the United States with the Republican Party and the strong Trump vote.
And despite the fact that Trump lost the elections, it must be said that he increased in votes and that now a whole movement has been created around him, MAGA, a movement that is very strong and that distances itself in many aspects from the Republican Party. How do you see this worldwide phenomenon of a popular right that demands this from its politicians and of politicians who are moving away from these historically right-wing parties?
Hermann Tertsch: That’s a logical popular reaction, the nation demands its space and they are trying to liquidate the nation. What we are dealing with is a global project to liquidate nations, to make nations disappear, which are the containers of democracy, there is no other container for democracy than the nation, and yet they are trying to destroy nations, precisely to turn us all into subjects of superstructures directed by the big interests of big corporations. This is what we are seeing right now in the United States, this sinister alliance between the extreme left and the big corporations and big tech, and the lobbies that lost and felt like losers with Trump, and are now returning to power.
In Spain we talk about that they are more and more ex-voters of the left and that they are more and more people who do not come from the Popular Party but who come from the National Reaction, but who join VOX because they think that they are really the only genuine representatives of the Spanish nation at this moment.
That is their great success, trying to put an end to this perverse phenomenon of voting for parties that asked for votes for the right and then uniting within the consensus, within the system, what they really did was to share power with a left that always had the ideological supremacy and always imposed its agenda.
We had the Popular Party with an absolute majority with Rajoy in Spain and he did not move a single comma of the perverse ideological laws that Zapatero put on historical memory, gender, etc., all the ideological laws of the left remained intact under those governments supposedly right-wing, but that supposed right has already been exhausted and certainly, in Catalonia they have demonstrated at this moment that they are in a deep crisis.
What seems to be already clearly outlined and crystallizing is that VOX is the only national alternative that exists in Spain today to that popular front of separatist socialists, who are an anti-Spanish totalitarian project to break the historical continuity of Spain, destroy the nation, overthrow the monarchy, make small republics that are easily manageable and controllable with no nation that can be defended.
In that sense, VOX is the new phenomenon that gives hope in the face of that exhaustion of the consensus- In this sense, yes we are the equivalent of MAGA in the United States where much of the Republican Party has turned to the system and has been asking more or less on its knees to the left and the Democratic Party to welcome it in its anti-Trump bosom, so to speak, it is a bit like what has happened here with Casado, who wanted to destroy Abascal, and ended up shooting himself, not in the foot but perhaps in the hip, if not in the head.
VV: In this awakening of people who are tired of those parties that claim to be right-wing but then govern as if they were left-wing, when they begin to gain strength and when movements like MAGA or political parties like VOX in Spain begin to emerge, these people who support them begin to be victims of violence that is not symbolic violence, as the left calls it, but real violence.
So, just as in Spain one sees that VOX politicians have to go out with the police escort and they are really attacked and they get really bloodied from the physical aggression of the left, here in the United States, for example in Washington, going out with something from MAGA is dangerous, recently in a MAGA march they stabbed one of the leaders of the Proud Boys -a group within MAGA-. How do you analyze this violence towards people who support these movements of the right and what can this lead to in a society?
Hermann Tertsch: We have seen that the left has carte blanche for violence, to resort to any kind of methods, here ETA terrorism is excused by allies of the government and the government itself, because we are seeing that in the government we have great justifiers of terrorism and great allies of the FARC.
We have the representative of the FARC, Enrique Santiago, who led the negotiations in Havana, now he is a Spanish deputy.
The representative of the largest narco-terrorist gang in the world, allied with the Cartel of the Suns and with the Maduro regime, we are talking about very dangerous people who do not have the slightest scruple, I think they have managed to normalize this violence on the part of the left against anyone who disagrees with them, regardless of how it is profiled, they resort to accusations. First there are big campaigns to call you Nazi and/or Fascist and if you are Nazi or Fascist anything against you is justified. If you don’t agree, you are already a Nazi or Fascist and if so, you have to be fought against by all possible means.
The violence they deploy is becoming more massive and more brutal. We will see how this continues, but what we have seen is that in Catalonia there has been a great response from many people in very bad conditions, because of the pandemic, because of the threats, because many people are really afraid to vote VOX because they might find out, for whatever reason, and despite this we have had a great success after the absolutely epic election campaign that it was.
This shows that there are people with courage and that people with courage are also contagious in the best sense of the word, and that courage is spreading to face the totalitarian roller coaster of the usual left, who are what they are: they are Venezuela, they are Cuba. It should not be necessary to explain to them what those who murder and torture and have been keeping the entire Cuban population in prison for 62 years, for God’s sake, are capable of doing, what they are doing. And what they are doing and what they have done with the richest country in the Americas, with Venezuela, which has seven million Venezuelans now scattered all over the continent and other continents as well, in dire, terrifying conditions, but fleeing from hunger, from torture, from the monstrous and criminal arbitrariness of a regime like that of Maduro.
And that regime of Maduro and the Cuban regime, thanks to aid and complicity, many also from democracies, is managing to expand further, and with the money from cocaine they are managing to recover a large part of the continent and take over the continent, they are destabilizing the remaining democracies and are strengthening the existing tyrannies and that is the path we are seeing at this moment and it is terrifying.
That is why we have presented the VOX Charter in Madrid, and the leader of VOX, Santiago Abascal, has presented the Madrid Forum as a great reaction against the Sao Paulo Forum, against the Puebla Group, against narco-terrorism and narco-socialism.
We want to articulate the synergies within America and in Europe we are the first ones threatened because it is no longer a thing of America, that the guerrilla in Colombia or the terrorists from Colombia moving to Ecuador, no, it is that we have those same people in the Government of Spain, in the Spanish Parliament we have people who are the allies and accomplices of Maduro and of all the murderers who are on the loose there, dedicated to drug trafficking and murder and kidnapping and to creating that machinery of totalitarian intimidation with which they are going to advance in Colombia as in all the other countries.
It is terrifying. We have to be lucid and courageous to defend freedom, the nation, which is the basis for all democracies and the truth, the truth in the face of all these waves of lies and manipulations that we receive daily from the media. The media deserves a separate chapter, the media are largely bribed but largely indoctrinated, and the university elites in the United States have already shown what they really are; what is produced by this type of militants who are not journalists and are only militants and new clerics. They are not intellectuals, they are clerics of the new religion which is the same totalitarian religion that has killed a hundred million people in a century and we still do not learn from it.
They keep on trying to do it again, they only produce hunger, misery, pain, horror, terror and they fail, and they start again, they kill again, they torture again and they subjugate and enslave the peoples again, and they fail again because you cannot give them more than hunger, misery, and failure and that is what we have to show these societies. To show them with the truth that these paths of socialism, no matter how narco, no matter how much money they have for electoral campaigns as now in Ecuador and as before in Bolivia, are a path only to misery and disaster, that there will be no equality, that they will be the most unequal.
VV: Hermann, I would like to ask you for an analysis and your message for the Latinos in the United States who are living a little bit this enchantment of the left, of the Democrats saying that it is their party that helps Latinos, that they are going to give them permits to stay and that kind of thing, and then, although the Republican vote has been growing, the Democrats still have many Latinos enchanted with this kind of thing and voting for their party, believing that the Democratic Party is the party of the immigrants.
Hermann Tertsch: It is nonsense, and I think that leaving Cuba, leaving Venezuela or leaving any of these countries and going to vote for Maduro’s friends or Castro’s friends, really seems to me that you have to have a lot of stomach or be very very wrong, to have received a lot of very very very twisted and very perverse information to reach those conclusions.
The only thing that Kamala Harris is going to do is to strengthen dictatorships and help those dictatorships to expand and that a great part of the mechanisms of those dictatorships will also be introduced, as the discourse is being introduced in the whole American fabric. For God’s sake, in the United States of America, what is happening inside the schools, in the universities, is terrifying. It is terrifying and it is part of this global bet to put an end to our freedoms.
In this sense, I believe that our project, the project for the future in prosperity can only be in freedom, there is no totalitarian project that is going to lead to social improvements even if they give you bags of food during the campaign or they promise them for later and they promise you whatever, see how Cuba is, see how Venezuela is, There is no option out there and of course the U.S. is going to suffer now with a government that only knows how to regulate, that only knows about interference, that does not believe in freedom, but believes in executive orders and that above all is going to start looting the country as they are looting us Spaniards.
What this Government of Sánchez has done since it has arrived has been to look for ways to take money from citizens in every possible way, there is no tax that they do not like, there is no tax that they do not raise, there is no excuse that they do not take to tax things, all this for expenses that are really crony expenses, expenses to improve their lives, lives that have been changing in a spectacular ways in two years.
It is an obscenity what is happening. Those who promised that they were going to have a maximum of two or three minimum salaries are receiving fortunes, they are hiring all their cousins, their uncles, their families. The Minister of Equality is the wife of Vice President Pablo Iglesias, this is unheard of, something that only happens in Nicaragua with Murillo and with Ortega. These are things that would never be tolerated in Europe but have happened in Spain, because they have brought us the codes of Ortega, of Murillo, of Maduro and his wife, of Chávez’s girlfriends, who later became millionaires.
The left dismantles democracies, but it is not that the most fragile democracies in the Americas are in danger and they destabilize them and create a dictatorship, we are talking about democracies within the European Union, where wills are being bought, where Mr. Monedero receives money and goes in and out with money from Chávez, and we are talking about the four hundred and some thousand dollars supposedly for a project of this Mr. Monedero who knows nothing, has no idea, of what the supposed study for which he was paid is about.
We are in a maelstrom that is the maelstrom of criminal leaders who are not politicians, who are criminals, who are ideologized mafias that feed on drug trafficking and who have a totalitarian project for all the Americas and Europe, they needed a bridgehead to enter the European Union and begin to pervert the system in Europe as well, and they have already broken in, they are already in Spain.
They are in the government, it is a very dangerous development but all our Latin American brothers have to know that our future does not lie in everyone going to Miami, or that they all ask Mr. Biden to let them enter so that Mr. Biden’s friends can have a cheap labor force, what we are talking about is to create the conditions for us to have free and dignified lives in our countries, with security, and that is what we have to demand, And in order to have that, it was much more logical to believe in a United States firm against the evil that is narco-socialism, than to have in Washington and in the White House corrupt accomplices of all these supposedly progressive adventures, which do not bring progress at all, but bring misery to all.
Vanessa Vallejo. Co-editor-in-chief of El American. Economist. Podcaster. Political and economic analysis of America. Colombian exile in the United States // Vanessa Vallejo. Co-editora en jefe de El American. Economista. Podcaster. Análisis político y económico de América. Colombiana exiliada en EE. UU.