Yesterday Santiago Abascal returned to Colón to lay the first stone there on his official path towards the November 29 elections. The Madrid square, now an icon in the history of Vox, has witnessed many milestones in the party's backpack: the mass bath that Abascal took in April 2019, hours before his emergence into Congress was consummated at the polls, to the closing, three years ago, of the campaign that led to his first major national setback.
And, yesterday, the party wrote another chapter. Abascal relied on a dozen of his international partners for his campaign start: the Italian Giorgia Meloni, the French Marine Le Pen, the Argentine Javier Milei, the Hungarian Viktor Orban and the Brazilian Flavio Bolsonaro, among others. In the square, the setting was the same as so many other times, with dozens of Spanish flags waving under the national flag that presides, but Abascal's speech was not entirely the same as before.
The Vox leader spoke of waving a "unitary flag" and a "common sense alternative" that goes beyond the division between right and left. And that desire that Abascal verbalized is in communion with the modulation of the tone of his speech that he has left in writing in his electoral program. In what is assumed to be its roadmap if it reaches La Moncloa, Vox lowers the goal in several of its most controversial theses, with vague promises that avoid more ambitious commitments, one day DNA of the party.
The clearest example is in their positions on abortion and euthanasia. "Defense of the right to life from its conception to natural death and the end of the culture of death," it states, without even expressly mentioning the terms. Vox proposes to "guarantee the conscientious objection of health professionals" and "strengthen" palliative care, but the promise to "repeal the euthanasia and abortion laws" that was contemplated in the 2023 text is left out of the program. At that time it also proposed "suppressing from public health surgical and hormonal interventions unrelated to health", including abortion and euthanasia, and proposed offering every pregnant woman an "information protocol" that would include "the possibility of hearing the fetal heartbeat."
None of that now appears in the Vox program. Abascal used the excuse that his positions "do not have a social majority" as an argument for leaving his theses on abortion in the background, and the truth is that, according to a Sigma Dos survey for EL MUNDO from a year ago, 63% of Spaniards are in favor of recognizing in the Constitution the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy. In search of the transversal vote, Vox has left its most controversial postulates out of the program, so much so that even the PP goes further in terms of concrete measures: it proposes that the "unborn conceived" count in determining aid to families.
Abascal also avoids sealing the statements he made in 2023 regarding LGTBI regulations. In this case, in fact, silence prevails to avoid entering into controversy: now there is no mention of this term, while three years ago Vox advocated repealing the LGTBI law and the trans law - approved in the previous legislature. "We will guarantee the impossibility of hormonal treatments and 'sex change' surgery in minors," the training continued, which also committed to "closing LGBT beach bars." Now, the only measure in the Vox program that could allude to something similar is the one that proposes "progressively reducing until its total elimination" subsidies to "ideological organizations."
And also in terms of historical memory, Abascal lowers his objective: if before he spoke of "repealing" the law in force, today he only promises his voters to "overcome" the "divisive ideological laws that confront the Spanish people", among them the Memory Law.
