Since the war ended, there have been intermittent episodes of violence between ethnoreligious groups. Although the patterns seem similar, different communities are now involved in the confrontations. The focus has shifted to make Sri Lankan Muslims — who make up around 9.7% of the country’s total population — the new target of extreme Buddhist Sinhalese factions that jumped on the bandwagon of rising Islamophobia.

Islamophobia in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, Muslims are defined by faith, not ethnicity since they are neither Tamil nor Sinhalese. During Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidential term in office from 2005 to 2015, as well as under incumbent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Muslims experienced a rise in Islamophobia. Acts perceived as anti-Muslim include calls, in 2013, by a hardline Buddhist Sinhalese group to halal food items. In 2019, the government banned following the Easter Sunday in which Islamist militants killed 269 people at churches and hotels.

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The most serious incidents involving the Muslim community since the end of the war took place in in 2014, in 2017 and the Ampara and Kandy’s in 2018. Acts of violence involved the burning of mosques, the destruction of Muslim-owned property, the displacement of thousands of civilians and the loss of lives.

The brutal on Easter Sunday led to, among other things, the draconian application of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which increased pressure on an already scrutinized minority. A well-known example of this backlash against Muslims was the case of Mohamed Shafi, a gynecologist at the Kurunegala Hospital. Shafi was arrested in 2019 under the PTA on trumped-up of illegally sterilizing Sinhalese women. Hejaaz Hizbullah, a senior lawyer, peace advocate and human rights activist, is in detention under the PTA. He has been of “aiding and abetting” one of the suicide bombers who attacked churches on Easter Sunday and “for engaging in activities deemed ‘detrimental to the religious harmony among communities.’”

Forced Cremations

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided the perfect breeding ground for far-right governments to bulldoze the human rights of minorities. In Sri Lanka, Muslims have been the target.

In December 2020, Fahim, a three-wheeler taxi driver, and his wife mourned not only the of their 20-day-old son, but the forced cremation of his tiny body by state authorities. The newborn was admitted to the hospital, where he passed away after contracting COVID-19. Fahim was denied access to his son’s corpse and, despite refusing to give his consent, the baby was cremated just days later.

That family’s grief was felt by many Muslims across Sri Lanka. Since COVID-19 first reached Sri Lanka in early 2020, the government announced a mandatory cremation-only policy. The government claimed this was to prevent the possible spread of the disease by coming into contact with infected corpses. The policy alarmed Sri Lankan Muslims as cremation is forbidden in Islam. Several and were made by the minority community to allow for the burial of their loved ones. Yet the Sri Lankan state, which has a long history of violence against minorities, refused to change its policy for over a year.

The anguish experienced by Sri Lankan Muslims was by itself a great burden to bear during these unprecedented times. But the state did not hold back on delivering further blows to the community. According to , families were “forced to bear the cost of cremation, typically around LKR 50,000-60,000 (approximately USD270-325), in a year that has economically strained many families.” The human rights organization stated, in December 2020, that many families led a difficult and painful protest by refusing to accept the ashes and making the associated payments required for cremating their loved ones.

Burying the Dead

In April 2020, Sri Lankan Muslims saw a glimmer of hope when the World Health Organization (WHO) that burials were safe. The WHO announced that there is no evidence to suggest that the coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, can spread from an infected corpse. Meanwhile, in December, top Sri Lankan doctors a statement urging for the burial of Muslim victims of COVID-19. They stated that “each citizen of Sri Lanka should be allowed to be cremated or buried as per his/her and the family’s desire within the strict guidelines recommended by the Ministry of Health.”

Despite expert opinions and recommendations to allow COVID-19 victims to be buried, the Sri Lankan government claimed that doing so “could contaminate ground water.” In an interview with the , Professor Malik Peiris, a world-renowned Sri Lankan virologist, stated that COVID-19 is “not a waterborne disease.” He added: “I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest it spreads through dead bodies. A virus can only multiply in a living cell. Once a person dies, the ability of the viruses to multiply decreases. … Dead bodies aren’t buried right in running water. Once you bury the body six feet under wrapped in impermeable wrapping, it is highly unlikely it would contaminate running water.”

In January 2021, an expert panel appointed by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Health its initial guidelines by approving either burying or cremating COVID-19 victims. But the minister of health, Pavithra Wanniarachchi, chose to ignore the recommendation. She in parliament that “the decision to cremate COVID dead in Sri Lanka will not be amended on religious, political or any other grounds.” She claimed a sub-committee said corpses should be cremated.

Sri Lankan Muslims have raised concerns at how the community reacted to the state-sanctioned racism. In January, Sri Lanka’s Muslim Council (SLMC) claimed that more than half of the island’s COVID-19 victims were from the Muslim community. “We have a disproportionate number of fatalities because Muslims don’t seek treatment fearing that they will be cremated if they are diagnosed with the virus after going to hospital,” spokesman Hilmy Ahamed told .

The SLMC and Sri Lanka’s justice minister, Ali Sabry, the government of trying to provoke the youth into doing “something rash” by refusing to allow Muslims to bury their dead. There have been no reports of isolated incidents or evidence of young Muslims taking to violence in response.

Under Pressure

While Muslims were singled out by the state and Buddhist Sinhalese , they received support from religious leaders and Sri Lankans of other faiths. Acts of took place in recent months and many Sri Lankans out against the cremation-only policy. The government, which is losing public confidence over its handling of the pandemic, had been under intense pressure to overturn its decision. Aside from concerned citizens, international bodies such as the and the condemned the forced cremations.

On February 22, as the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commenced its 46th annual session, Sri Lanka was in a precarious position. With a backlog of war crimes that remained unaddressed, a UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka loomed. On February 25, the Sri Lankan government its official gazette, finally allowing Muslim and Christian victims of COVID-19 to be buried.

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Sinhala and Tamil are the national languages of Sri Lanka, according to Chapter IV of the — which was amended in 1987 to give Tamil the status of an official language that was denied nine years earlier — and English was declared the link language. Sinhala and Tamil are genetically unrelated languages. The former belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and is spoken by about 74% of the , namely native and second-language speakers. Tamil, a Dravidian language, is spoken by about 18% of citizens on the island, mainly consisting of Tamil people and Muslims.

But Sinhala and Tamil are more than just two languages in Sri Lanka. As with other parts of the world, languages are social tools that allow us to communicate, but they can also be vehicles of power frequently used as ideological weapons of oppression.

Anthems and flags are probably the most agglutinative semiotic symbols that reaffirm a nation’s identity, setting the boundaries against external forces but also as potential tools for unity or division, depending on how they are exploited politically. National anthems construct a narrative of belonging that becomes unavoidably linked to concepts like power and resistance through history. But exactly for all these reasons, anthems (and flags) can be instrumentalized with a clear symbolic meaning. 

The Civil War

The Sri Lankan Civil War that took place between 1983 and 2009 had, among many causes, linguistic roots. The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 — which stripped Tamil of its official status as a language and instead gave this right to Sinhala to replace English — was one of the triggers of the conflict. While the Sinhalese people claimed that the act was a measure to distance themselves from their English colonizers (via demotion of their language) and reassess their recently acquired independence as a nation, the Tamils felt the act was a sign to subjugate them — with all the economic and education implications it entailed — and became of the main reasons to justify their demand for self-determination.

After the war ended in 2009, there was an unofficial ban imposed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa that prevented the Tamil version of the anthem — in use since 1951 — from being sung at official institutions. The defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels in the conflict led to the progressive refusal of the Tamil version of the anthem, even at institutional events that took place in the Tamil-speaking region. On many occasions, the measure was even imposed by the security forces as another example of what has been called the “” of Sri Lanka.

The post-war years have witnessed the spread of racist rhetoric during the presidencies of Rajapaksa and Sirisena. Intermittent communal violence, extreme nationalist propaganda and discrimination against minorities have continued.

Wounds Have Not Healed

In a 2017 , my colleague and I examined the discourse of transitional justice on the island. We analyzed the reactions of social media users to the measures taken by President Sirisena on allowing the national anthem to be sung in Tamil. At the time, the new government came to power with a promise to foster reconciliation, ensure accountability and improve human rights in Sri Lanka.

In our trilingual corpus (Sinhala, Tamil and English), most of the data analyzed showed the polarization of a Sri Lankan society whose wounds were not yet healed. Whereas a sector of the population welcomed Sirisena’s decision as an attempt to promote reconciliation toward minorities and held hopes for a new style of politics, others saw in the gesture a sign of weakness of a president whose first important measure was taking a bow to the Tamils.

Paradoxically, most of the arguments both for and against the measure were the same, with the actors involved being the only difference. Thus, the supporters of the bilingual performance cited similar situations in Canada and South Africa, whereas those against it provided the example of India as a role model to follow, with only one out of its 22 official languages chosen to sing the national anthem.

A New President

In Sri Lanka, the last election in November 2019 saw how a new leader but an old political force and name could rise to power. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former secretary to the Ministry of Defense under the government led by his brother, became president. Right after the electoral results were made public, the Tamil-language street signs of some roads in Colombo, the capital city, were attacked and removed. These kinds of acts, only attributable to a minority group, are meaningful when it comes to looking at the Tamil language within Sri Lankan identity.

In January 2020, President Rajapaksa announced that the anthem would only be sung in Sinhala during celebrations for independence day on February 4, going back to the pre-Sirisena days and reliving old ghosts from a forgettable past. The measure — which was understood as a statement of intent of a president who claimed he to be the leader of all Sri Lankans — was seen as a symbol of discrimination toward the Tamil minority who had been excluded from taking part in one of the country’s main signs of identity. Activists and members of civil society reacted by singing the anthem in Tamil in a that circulated on social media platforms as a gesture of support toward their fellow citizens, as well as the rejection of the discriminatory measure taken by the new government.

Any ethnic group’s greatest is its language, and the rejection of minority languages has become a tool to marginalize their cultures and traditions. In many cases, they are also used as proxies for ethnoreligious discrimination and the imposition of the supremacy of the majority via language. The ideas of unity, reconciliation and coexistence must inevitably consider a Sri Lankan identity beyond and solely based on one ethnicity, one religion and one language. Singing the national anthem in both official languages could be a great first step toward it.

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With Podemos, a left-wing party, Spaniards have become accustomed to phrases that are a break from what they considered old and useless ways of doing politics. This is referred to as “vieja política vs nueva política,” or old politics vs. new politics.

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VOX, a far-right party, brought a wide array of terms to discredit the left and their ideological system. This is a system perceived as involving “ideología de género” (gender ideology), “feminismo supremacista” (feminist supremacism) and “la España Bolivariana” (the Bolivarian Spain). Yet VOX has also attacked the more conservative forces that its supporters describe as “derechita cobarde,” or right-wing cowards.

In addition, VOX has also advocated for a set of national symbols, including the flag, the anthem or the cross. It has also pushed for the historical revival of events such as the Reconquista, the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa or the Army of Flanders, as well as figures like Don Pelayo or the Catholic Kings. VOX has carefully chosen these subjects to shape its ideology.

As extreme opposites of the political spectrum, both of these parties are examples of the present-day populism in Spain despite their differing linguistic styles. Whereas Podemos often opts for complex rhetoric, VOX has a straightforward way of communicating its message.

Online Wars

It is worthwhile to compare the rhetoric of political leaders in debates or rallies during electoral campaigns and the type of discourse that they or, in particular, their followers use on social media. Supporters of both parties tend to display a higher level of aggressiveness and extremism on social networks, mainly as it is online. Cyberspace is a breeding ground for dogmatic, bigoted and exclusionary language due to perceived anonymity and a presumed lack of accountability that users think they have behind a screen. This is what Claire Hardaker, a lecturer at Lancaster University in the UK, calls the “,” even when people use their real identities.

The presence of “virtual communities” whereby people around the world have the possibility to communicate in a many-to-many context, coupled with the endless possibility of what the internet offers, has redefined the feelings of inclusion or exclusion and increased the wish to belong through participation in cybermobs. All these features are related to the concepts of group salience and polarization that favor the ignition and propagation of online hostility. 

The divisive language on social media in Spain, particularly on Twitter, over the last few months of 2019 reached levels not found before. This was mainly due to two reasons: the Catalonian independence process and the exhumation of the late dictator Francisco Franco’s corpse. Both events might seem unrelated, but they are actually connected. On the one hand, many of those opposed to exhuming Franco were also against Catalonia’s right to self-determination and independence from Spain. On the other hand, many who backed it are often supportive of Catalonia’s claims.

The binary construction of the world into “us vs. them” tends to enhance (or create) intergroup bias, with the ultimate goal of reinforcing in-group bonds and ties. More specifically, it leads to fairly homogenous groups of supporters and opponents. Yet on this occasion, and due to the events aforementioned, Spanish society has become more polarized and the division has resulted in two sides that are no longer considered opponents but enemies.

In relation to Catalonia, the referendum over the region’s status in October 2017, and the subsequent declaration of independence issued by the Catalan parliament — which was suspended by the Spanish government — have drawn a line between two Spains on a topic that does not hold the possibility of seeing an amicable solution.

Traitors vs. Patriots

Two sides have thus been established: traitors or patriots. The lexical choices made by both factions to label each other have revealed their ideological basis and the pillars of their stances showing two incompatible perspectives. Pro-independence supporters have used the term “fascist” to refer to Spain, in addition to “political prisoners,” “exiled politicians” and “occupation forces.” The far right has described the situation with phrases such as “terrorism,” “enemies of the country” or “separatism.”

The historical event that still divides speakers of both sides is the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, even though most of them were not alive to see that conflict. In relation to Franco’s exhumation, the war was essentially resurrected on Twitter using the imagery of sports that had been previously referred to by in 1980 as one of the basic conceptual metaphors.

The fact that Franco’s corpse was exhumed in 2019 — casting aside the political reasons of both sides for or against this — was perceived as a victory by supporters on the left. For followers on the far right, they were reminded that whatever they do with Franco’s corpse, the right would always be the “winner” of the war and that that fact could not be erased.

In the Spanish general election of November 2019, VOX historically won 52 parliamentary seats for the first time. Thousands of its supporters gathered outside party headquarters to celebrate while singing “A por ellos” (go for them). No one, either from the party or its supporters, clarified what was meant by “them.” That kind of exclusionary discourse that fosters the division, enhances the difference and deepens the irreconcilable views is the last thing Spain needs at a time of instability.

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In countries where the political systems are broken, and where journalism can often carry a risk to one’s life, the role of journalists becomes even more critical. They become witnesses against oppression who flag the voices of the unheard, bringing to light facts and events that either fall below the radar or are purposely suppressed. In 2018, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) about media safety in Sri Lanka and asked all social actors to defend the freedom and independence of the press, as well as to protect journalists’ rights. In a 25-year period, from 1990 to 2015, on the island according to data by the IFJ.

This is not the complete picture, however. Some citizens, who have disappeared over the years, are not on the list of the official victims. There is the case of cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda who, after phoning his wife, never reached home on January 24, 2010. Eknaligoda frequently used his pen to depict corruption, human rights abuses and the erosion of democracy in Sri Lanka. Almost a decade on, he is still missing, while his case remains open. His wife, Sandya, has been restlessly fighting for answers despite she and her children have faced over the years.

Communicative Weapons

The genre of political cartoons, which includes satire and caricatures, usually conveys editorial commentary on politics and politicians, as well as current events, and plays a vital role in the construction of the political discourse in society. Political cartoons are symbolic illustrations that can also become powerful communicative weapons. They are hugely efficient at transmitting messages and do so in the most economical way. Few words are needed, often coated in witty humor and usually making use of hyperbole and satire in order to question authority and probe social problems.

To some extent, cartoonists nowadays are like modern jesters, like those in the Middle Ages who were allowed to tell the truth to the king without risking their heads being chopped off. The big difference, however, is that cartoonists, unlike those merrymen of yore, are not safe. Many have been threatened and even killed for being considered offensive, such as those who lost their lives in the 2015 attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Undeterred, Sri Lanka’s cartoonists have taken on the extremists flaming inter-ethnic conflict on the island.

Even though there is no far-right movement as such in Sri Lanka, according to , a Sri Lankan diplomat and academic, what is rising across the country is a type of religious alt-right movement, with “the distinctive markers that define its core constituency and its social consciousness.” Some of the markers that make the Sri Lankan alt-right unique, in his opinion, are “the role of the clergy/ex-military interface, the dominant ideology, and the mentality and dynamics within the clergy.” Assuming a defensive attitude, these extremists are constantly looking for — and finding — threats to the Sinhala-Buddhist identity, mainly in the form of Sri Lanka’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious community.

Focusing on the post-civil war era, after 2009, minorities in Sri Lanka have not enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with the Buddhist majority. The new preferred target has been the Muslim community that makes up barely 9% of the island’s population. Systematic attacks against Muslims have become a constant, with several high recorded in the cities of Aluthgama in 2014, Gintota in 2017 and Digana in 2018. In some of these cases, violence was instigated by the speeches delivered by the , who have acted with impunity under the government of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and now under President Maithripala Sirisena. This ethno-religious, ultra-nationalist alt-right in Sri Lanka has been shaping the agenda of both the previous and the current administrations.

As Professor Javadeya Uyangoda, a constitutional expert and political scientist, , there is a “consolidation of a hard right-wing alternative to a weak and shaky democratic regime option,” represented by groups of . One such group is the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force), which organizes anti-Muslim actions, both online and offline. It has initiated boycotts of Muslim companies and halal products, opposes Muslim women’s clothes, stages protests outside Muslim-owned retail outlets and the in Colombo, spreading hate speech in public meetings and on social media. The group have also expressed a wish to see a Hitler-type military ruler come to power in the elections scheduled for later this year.

Social Function

In this political environment, cartoonists become central voices to call out those abuses of power. Their real social function, equivalent to that of journalists, may pass unnoticed by the average reader. In this sense, cartoonists are activists — vital for society but threatening for the authorities, since they can easily reach the common man who may not have the time or the capacity to read lengthy articles filled with convoluted political jargon.

Sri Lanka has always had a strong tradition of , but currently the genre seems more robust than ever. Among the best-known artists working today are , , Dasa Hapuwalana, and R.C. Pradeep. Their daily cartoons are easy to consume and direct in the brutality they betray.

Sri Lankan cartoonists have been speaking up against extremism and racism backed by the alt-right, the unconstitutional measures adopted by the government, the periodic bans on social media following outbreaks of ethnic conflict and the wave of Islamophobia that arose after the devastating Easter Sunday attacks earlier this year. They have never lowered their voices, brandishing their pens together with their political conscience and bravery as their only weapons.

Political cartoons are a symptom of a healthy society. Together with the political opposition, members of civil society, activists and journalists, cartoonists are essential actors in democratic and non-democratic spaces. Let’s hope that one day, Sri Lankan cartoonists will be able to satirize peaceful and positive events in their homeland.

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Memes have a frequent presence in our daily lives. They flood our timelines on different social media platforms, usually to provide us with a smile. Originally, the term “meme” was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to describe the flow and flux of culture. The meme was born as a cultural counterpoint to the gene, since, for Dawkins, biological evolution has been surpassed by cultural evolution as a key factor of human behavior.

In Dawkins’s words, concepts so culturally broad like art, technology, language, art and religion are “,” built from sets of several micro-level memes. Memes are multimodal artifacts that combine image with text, usually have an uncertain and popular origin, no attributed authorship and are perfect examples of participatory media since readers are free to reproduce, appropriate and modify them.

From the point of view of discourse, “constructions used to articulate argumentations” that have two main features. One is the presence of a cultural element (with a communicative intention), and the other is the presence of humor, almost always a joke (or a remark intended to be funny). Memes may adopt different formats, from the very popular macros rage comics, remixed images or comics, among others.

Although, at least in origin, memes were associated with jokes, the truth is that humor is a very controversial concept. The possibility of linking hate speech or extreme language with humor looks disturbing, to say the least, since it is assumed that prejudice, intolerance and fanaticism are humorless per se.

However, Christie Davies, in his book Ethnic Humour Around the World, argued that those who tell ethnic jokes do not necessarily have to share the stereotypes the jokes express. Thus, Davies establishes a distinction between the mischievous tone of jokes and the seriousness of anti-Semitism. When jokers are challenged, they have the possibility to draw back using the defensive excuse “I was only joking,” as .

What is clear about humor is that it is used to establish solidarity within social groups as well as to draw the boundaries between them. This is the reason why a kind of humor is enjoyed by the members of a given group and not by the ones out of it.

Internet Cosmos

The internet cosmos is full of hate or extreme speech. The World Wide Web is actually a paradise for racists who can be brave behind the protection offered by the screens of their computers where they feel secure and minimize the risk of exposure. They can say what they really think without fear of losing face within the social groups they belong to, often using a fake identity to release their real self.

Social media applications such as Facebook or Twitter have become the agora for attacking, mocking, insulting, denigrating and humiliating members of the LGTBQ community, women, black people, native Americans and Jews, among many others. Muslims have been one of the most targeted groups, giving way to the so-called cyber Islamophobia, or irrational hostility toward Muslims and Islam expressed online.

Even though many of those attacks come in written form, there is a wide range of anti-Muslim memes. In a 2018 I carried out on 150 anti-Muslim memes retrieved mainly from Twitter and Google images, the most numerous memes perpetuated the different stereotypes usually attributed to Muslims. These include the oppression of women in Islam, the inherent violent nature of Muslim men, the aggressiveness of the religion itself, their taste for pedophilic or zoophilic practices, a potential to become terrorists, the lack of intelligence of the followers of Islam (mocking aspects such as the 72 virgins) and the threat posed by the concept of multiculturalism perceived as a Trojan Horse in the Western world.

The type of memes in which a text is superimposed on an image is called macros. Usually, it is the written text that carries the anti-Muslim message. One example depicts the recurrent stereotype that Muslims are generally pedophiles who marry very young girls. In this kind of meme, the image is centered and framed by two sentences; the one on top gives a general statement, while the one at the bottom provides the “humoristic” twist: “My wife called me a paedophile. That’s a big word for a 9 year old [sic��.”

Another example of gendered Islamophobia is a meme in which a woman wearing a burqa is visually compared with the garbage bags next to her. The question of the loss of individual identity of women in Islam is targeted in the meme through the dehumanization of the object via visual analogy.

Memes are extremely efficient means of spreading hate since images have a great impact on the viewer, and the ideological content is provided by the short message that accompanies them. Even more, the fact that memes are mainstream products of popular culture make their hate content pass unnoticed by some readers who will just focus on the “funny” side without adverting the hateful content.

Readers do not have to make a great effort to decodify the message, and the very nature of memes makes them products to be shared, modified or easily altered because to their uncertain origin and lack of copyright restrictions. Thus, the speed of dissemination, impact and reach of memes are extremely high.

Laughing at Your Own Clichés

However, in a very intelligent move, some Muslims resorted to the very tool of memes to the hate projected directed against them. In a counter-hate series of memes, Muslims dismantled the stereotypes attributed to them by reusing them with humor.

These memes show the popular “ordinary Muslim man” macro meme in which the main actor is a Muslim man wearing a taqiyah hat. The structure of the memes is always the same: The Muslim man occupies the center of the meme, which is framed by a sentence on top and another at the bottom that follow the bait-and-switch pattern. The first part of the sentence at the top always refers to any commonplace attributed to Muslims that acts as bait — “I want my wife to be fully covered” — and the bottom part switches the cognitive construction the reader has anticipated after reading the first part, smashing the stereotype — “by a comprehensive insurance policy.” Memes prove to be a very powerful reply to hate when the target group is the first one laughing at its own clichés.

Humor has proved to be a very powerful strategy to fight Islamophobia by reversing the expected reaction and changing the dynamics of communication. It acts to give cohesion to the Muslim community without offending the attackers. Readers, however, must be aware of the hate speech present in many elements of popular culture in subtle ways that, precisely because of that, may not be immediately obvious, but definitely permeate our lives.

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In recent years, Spain’s political system has gone through a number of convulsions. The traditional alternation in government between the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), along with the continuous cases of corruption that affected both of them, successfully planted and nurtured the seed of disappointment among a large sector of Spanish society. The situation reached its peak when disaffected citizens decided to take to the streets in what became the origin of the so-called Los Indignados, also known as the .

This socio-political movement was the root of the far-left populist political party Podemos, founded in March 2014. Inspired by other populist parties of far-left orientation, such as that of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or Evo Morales in Bolivia, they claimed to be the inheritors of the real spirit of the left and were willing to implement a genuine leftist agenda totally abandoned, in their point of view, by the Socialist Party — and, to certain extent, by the Communist Party — who had betrayed their voters.

Podemos brought a new style of politics and a new lexicon to the Spanish political scene that quickly seeped into the daily vocabulary of thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger generation. Words such as casta (caste), revolución Bolivariana (Bolivarian Revolution), bloque (block) or el régimen del 78 () have never been so frequently heard in parliament or during election campaigns.

Surprisingly, Podemos got five members into the European Parliament just two months after its launch. A big percentage of first-time voters and plenty of young people saw in this group of political-science lecturers in their thirties the reincarnation of cultivated rebels ready to fight for (and hopefully win) a fairer and more egalitarian society. But Podemos was not alien to the longing for freedom by its members, and the internal divisions appeared immediately. The departure of some of the founding members, such as Pablo Echenique or Carolina Bescansa, and the explicit antagonism between its president, Pablo Iglesias, and vice president, Iñigo Errejón, soon weakened the movement.

Changing the Status Quo

While Podemos was faltering, Spain’s ruling People’s Party was also being deteriorated by scandals of corruption affecting some of its most prominent members (Rodrigo Rato, Luis Bárcenas or Cristina Cifuentes to name but a few) that eroded the confidence of the electorate and wore away the authority of President Mariano Rajoy. The corruption cases brought against the president provided the perfect opportunity for the Socialist Party to oust Rajoy after he lost a no-confidence vote in parliament in June 2018, followed by his subsequent resignation as the president of the PP. With the Socialist Party’s ascension to power and the orphaned state of the Spanish right wing, another minority political force acquired a more prominent role: Vox.

Vox was founded in December 2013 by former members of the Popular Party who were mostly disappointed with party policy in relation to the state of autonomies, the way PP dealt with the Basque terrorist organization ETA, and its internal fiscal policy. They contested the 2014 elections but failed to win seats. Until the fall of 2017, Vox was still a marginal party, but after the terrorist attacks in Barcelona and, above all, after the issue of Catalonia’s independence, the number of members increased by .

Vox also brought a set of words not used in the Spanish politics before: Reconquista (reconquest) — historically used to refer to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain by the Catholic Kings — and the constant refrain of phrases like la unidad de España (unity of Spain) and España, lo primero (Spain, First). It follows the trail of Europe’s radical-right parties and incorporates in its political agenda the rhetoric and discourse of its European colleagues, specially in relation to immigration policy (migrants will be admitted according to economic needs and their ability to adapt to Spanish customs, culture and way of living, with a clear preference to South American immigrants over Muslims); women’s rights (the right to free abortion should be suppressed); the modification of the law on violence against women; or the status of the LGTBQ community (ban on gay marriage and possibility to adopt children).

Stunned and Divided

This new style of politics was explicitly displayed since last autumn, but especially during the political campaign in last year’s Andalucian elections. The vote, which took place on December 2, saw Vox historically win 12 seats in parliament — something no other party running for the first time has ever achieved, putting in danger 36 years of Socialist hegemony and becoming the first far-right party to win such a margin of popular support in Spain’s post-Franco era.

Vox’s election triumph shocked and radically divided Andalucia: Supporters are exultant about this historic result, while others are astonished to see the decline of nearly four decades of Socialist rule. In some Andalucian cities, citizens quickly organized demonstrations to protest the possibility of Vox becoming part of the ruling coalition in the region. In Granada, thousands of voters, mainly university students, to express their opposition to Vox’s ideology. Just a few hours after the results were announced, students used social media to channel their fears about two main things: education grants and the role of women. Some of my colleagues working on gender studies told me they worried about losing European funding for their projects if Vox becomes part of the government.

Vox knows it now holds the , having said on January 9 that it would support a coalition between the Popular Party and the center-right Citizens, after dropping some of its most controversial demands. Only time will tell if Vox’s rise is borne of disappointment, dissatisfaction and frustration with the country’s political process felt by the hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, or whether there is a real solidarity with the movement’s ideological principles.

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