It was only fitting that perhaps the oddest outlet to ride the wave of right-populist ferment into what Nigel Farage once called a “gas holder-looking theatre” at the mega-euro-race on June 9th was a “grouping of electors”, not a party proper — its gaping want of policy substance concealed by a red-tailed squirrel masked à la Guy Fawkes.

The logo suitably captures the tous pourris-style cyber-populism of Luis Pérez Fernández, a.k.a. “Alvise”, long a pariah whose all-out crusade against Spain’s politico-media complex is widely felt to have indulged in its own share of conspiracy theory and even hoax. At only thirty-four, the Seville-born activist eked out three seats atop the aptly named list Se Acabó la Fiesta (“The Party is Over”, or SALF per its acronym) on a mumbled platform of distrust, defiance — and keep waging his hybrid war against Madrid’s corrupt socialist rulers from the European Parliament (EP). Slenderly alert, chipmunk-like, to the Spanish establishment’s moral rot, Alvise seems also firm about braving the risk of becoming a participate in a modern info-political updating of the botched 1605 Gunpowder plot — this time against the fast-hardening rule of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

 Farage added about the Strasbourg chamber he spent three decades visiting, in that same interview to the LBC network, that it resembled a Roman amphitheatre on the inside, with establishment groups keen to release the lions on the Eurosceptics. With his own self-deprecating talent, but penchant for victimology, it’s hard to see Alvise grow into an iconic Member of the European Parliament (MEP) of Farage’s stature — let alone outlast him on the role. Yet as Europe’s bloc of national-populists seems at times to turn into a fissiparous mosaic of programmatic nuances and competing egos, the youthful firebrand’s anti-political rise holds lessons for those looking to mount a credible challenge to the supranational chimera that is about Alvise’s age. Spin-offs, rivalries and fractures have elsewhere revolved around substance: the clashing regional interests of Italy’s coalition partners, Éric Zemmour’s challenge to Marine Le Pen’s “un-demonization”, and geopolitical loggerheads around the Ukraine war in places like Poland and Portugal. Rooted in personality and mystique instead, with potential to turn anti-establishment fervour against the “new right” in turn, candidates in Alvise’s mould will instead be harder to fend off — and at once more threatening.

True to SALF’s logo, Alvise remains “anonymous” in Brussels, with outside observers at pains to distinguish him from the established national-conservatives of Vox — trailing the country’s partisan duopoly as its third largest force, but 600,000 votes down at last July’s national race, with a doubling of its MEPs to six, this time around, lower than hoped. SALF shares Spain’s fourth spot in the EP ex-aequo with the neo-communist Sumar alliance and a bundle of left- regionalist outlets, ahead of the woke, anti-neoliberal Podemos — all of which have played some role or other in propping up Sánchez’s coalitions since 2018. Alvise would seem to run a one-man show, meanwhile, even if he didn’t suck up what little attention goes to his party: his two elected comrades are literal quidams even in Spain, allegedly picked on a merit basis by independent recruiters, in a move meant to depart sharply from Spain’s dominant culture of patronage and favouritism for selecting yes-men as lawmakers and elected officials. Even as he polled two-to-three MEPs as far back as a month ago, his victory has baffled Spain’s conformist commentariat, which incredulously discounted his chances of “making it” without a program, a structure, identifiable talent — and with so many enemies.

Alvise is to them at best a tempestuous activist for “informational freedom” — a form of crowdsourcing media narratives among the citizenry, manifestly not coterminous with freedom of information — and at worst a one-man factory of half-truths and outright deceit. Fabrication and plagiarism were rife on his social media accounts even before he seized on Covid-19 to launch Resistencia Popular SL — a “consultancy” running effectively as a hotline for political hush-hush. 

In fairness, Alvise’s own side of the story is not easy to hear. Unanimously shunned by mainstream media as a literal threat to the profession, he was shut off in February 2022 from X indefinitely for repeatedly leaking private pictures and testing the platform’s fact-verification mechanism. The only way to feel his base’s pulse is through Telegram, where he blasts daily harangues to about half a million subscribers. Yet even that is short of the 800,000 squirrels — ardillas, as he calls his supporters — he got to vote for him across Spain’s fifty-two provinces, reaching 7% in mostly southern outposts like Málaga and Murcia, despite many allegedly only receiving SALF’s paper slip from the campaign itself in the days prior. Alvise has reported the lack of them at polling stations — and other forms of cheating he alleges — as a premeditated form of fraud that cost him a fourth MEP, commensurate with the million Spaniards he claims intended to vote for him.

He has set himself apart from career politicians even before his euro-mandate begins: his opportunism is self-avowed. Brussels was never Alvise’s focus, and the driving goal of his bid for an MEP seat is openly asserted: immunity — or more lenient prosecution — in cases brought to Spain’s High Court against him, mostly by current and former socialist ministers, colleagues in a cabinet with the far-left that rests — as Sánchez’s entire government does since elections in July last year — on a much-maligned amnesty deal for Catalan secessionist leaders horse-traded for the amnestied beneficiaries voting to re-enthrone Sánchez as PM. Alvise’s hard-edged whistleblowing tactics were at times vindicated in these trials, and at others shown to have rested on falsehood. If his lack of an EU platform isn’t per se shocking in a race for supranational office that is nonetheless waged along national battlelines, his domestic policy agenda isn’t very concrete either. He claims to have a 300-page program to right the Spanish ship but won’t release it to avoid attracting even tougher lawfare attacks. The vision, however, was summed up on election night, at a nightclub turned into a press conference, as wanting to topple a “corrupt, depraved and criminal” caste that has turned Spain into political Sodom, with blanket categorizations of the political class and their enablers as “pedophiles, outlaws and thieves”.

Alvise’s rabble-rousing ire may seem inchoate, but it is resolutely right-wing. Though he never lacked ambition, he ran for no office under two successive governments of the right-of-centre Partido Popular (2011-2018), which has a claim to have been more institutionally corrupt at the party-level than the ruling socialists of PSOE. Besides the Trumpian trutherism, Alvise blends Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele with his law-and-order pablum fused with an equally vague libertarian state-scepticism. Long critical of mass migration and gender ideology, he was fired for his views in late 2019, back from studying in Leeds, from a staffer role with the liberal-centrist Cuidadanos party—now virtually defunct — having earlier joined the UK Liberal Democrats. Having also posed as the only non-secessionist Spaniard to join Liberal Youth, a network that encompassed the under-35 wings of various Spanish regionalist outlets, he then toyed with the prior iteration of Spain’s ever-hopeless centrist political field, Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD). Spain’s bipartisan monopoly remains Alvise’s overriding concern, but his views on substance have changed unrecognizably since the youthful, centripetal idealism of his college years.

This campaign, he has “pledged” to build Europe’s largest prison outside Madrid, for 40,000 inmates, decrying that law enforcement has been disarmed and corruptly abandoned by power against life-threats from criminals and narcotraffickers. Bukele’s controversial mega-prison in El Salvador, for reference, is twenty times smaller. Whereas the average Spaniard is barely aware of the uptick in organized drug trade around Galician and Andalusian shores, Alvise has seized on the issue to throw down the gauntlet, blasting police’s inability to shoot from the distance at high sea: “if it’s either your mom crying or mine, let it be yours, and you go down to the depths of the sea!” he intoned in his victory speech. He was referring to the tragic death in early February of two civil guards in Barbate (Cádiz), assaulted by a narco-speedboat. What little he has said about EU policy proper was channelled in a humorous—though slightly overdone—Andalusian accent that masked a mix of tautology and incongruence: “tomatoes now need more paperwork to leave the grove than illegal immigrants coming into our country!”. Illegal immigration is defined by lack of papers, and mandatory health certifications for primary produce were introduced far before the EU’s current environmental push.

Alvise tucks to the spectrum’s epicentre, however, in echoing a widely held sentiment against “partocracy” (partitocracia). Though often referred to as an immutable feature of the regime born out of the 1978 transition to democracy, the bipartisan duopoly into which the Francoist deep state allegedly morphed could technically surrender its power and entrust it to more transparently meritocratic structures — or have it wrestled away without major upsets. Parties currently receive perks in the form of subsidies, positions of state, other forms of patronage such as appointments to ideologically-infused quangos (“chiringuitos”) and entrenched presence in airtime, ad space and parliamentary politics—notably through Spain’s duopolistic electoral law. Yet Alvise has gone beyond the morphological critique that even neophytes within PP and PSOE have voiced and in fact despises politics itself, pledging to stay out of the gravy train even while in office. By mere dint of being in the profession, he has suggested, politicians place money, loyalty and image above serving the common good — and oftentimes choose to even harm the public for individual gain. This cravenness crystallized around Covid-19’s wrecking ball to the confidence that underpinned the 1978 system. Alvise squeals that politicians were afforded luxury treatment while the average Joe couldn’t bid farewell to lost ones.

His economic left-populism goes further, and in this he also approximates the average citizen of his age. Alvise is a pure product of the cumulative elite overproduction that rocked Spanish politics in 2012 with the rise of Podemos — the party whose leaders he has lampooned as champagne socialists — by pitting against “neoliberalism” scores of jobless graduates promised well-paying employment even for socially worthless degrees. He himself scraped by as a member of the precariat in Leeds, as a dishwasher and community manager for the Instituto Cervantes. He has spoken of friends doing similar menial jobs with two bachelor’s and two masters’ as a “shameless crime”. He reckons himself, however, to lack the meritocratic ethos and pedigree that, paired with lack of opportunities, spurred the 2010s unrest in the first place: he has styled himself as an “academic illiterate”, having left an off-campus college to become a career political operative.

Trade unions, multinationals, interest groups and civil servants also share a part of the blame for Spain’s moral straits, but the onus of Alvise’s bile is squarely placed on establishment media, the most vicarious appendage of the system, a cadre of “mercenaries” and “informational terrorists” that provide cover for the powerful by feeding worms into the numbed brains of Spaniards, who end up falling for palpable lies—hook, line and sinker. SALF’s logo stars the “Anonymous” mask, and Alvise could make good friends among the hacktivism of some of Europe’s pirate parties, but his task is more akin to that of un-hacking the mentalities wired to turn a blind eye to — and even normalise — political felony.

The role he ascribes to the media reminds of Trump’s “enemies of the people” mantra, and Alvise staged the same anti-MSM sentiment by pointing fingers, in the same celebratory press gaggle, at all the large outlets that sneered at him but were forced to show up that night and eat their hats before the man they had so glibly underestimated. He reserves the most animus for Spain’s progressive media power couple par excellence, Ana Pastor and Antonio García-Ferreras, the former of whom Alvise alleges owes him 25,000 EUR in trial expenses for failing to prove that his comments about the dubiously biased fact-checking outlet she runs — Newtral — were false. In daring her husband, an anchor at the leading left-wing network LaSexta, to host him for a debate in exchange for waiving Pastor’s judicial debt, Alvise has sought to expose an incestuously concentrated media landscape as colluding with the powers-that-be doling out the patronage. Since La Sexta and Antena 3 merged to create, in 2012, a de facto leftist monopoly of TV that works in tandem with the country’s largest daily, El País, progressive journalists have turned to carrying water to the powerful instead of speaking truth to them — thus pre-enabling the autocratic creep of an ambitious demagogue like Sánchez.

But the immediate target, at least judicially, are Sánchez’s ministers. Alvise awaits a retrial against former Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos upon publishing a picture of him on his balcony staring at a bird, surmising ill mental health. Even with the charge of illegitimate attack on Abálos’ honour hanging over his head, Alvise partly claims credit for toppling and disgracing him from the cabinet amidst a different scandal involving the corrupt purchase of Covid-19 masks mid-pandemic, orchestrated by his chauffeur-turned-chief-of-staff, Koldo. Alvise also asserts authorship of the information behind Tito Berni, another case involving bribes to — and extortions of — businessmen in exchange for public favours, all shrouded in an atmosphere of drugs and prostitution that Alvise claims is standard fare among PSOE bigwigs. He claims, more questionably, to have played a hand in the case currently surrounding Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, likely the most damning for the PM at this stage. Spain got into an unprecedented diplomatic spat with Argentina over the First Lady’s dealings when Argentina’s Javier Milei accused her of being “corrupt” at Vox’s international jamboree a few weeks ago. Gómez is at the heart of one of democratic Spain’s largest influence-peddling scandals ever, accused of playing intermediary between the bucketloads of EU NextGen money and multinationals who endowed her with a professorship, among other favours.

There is more. Óscar Puente, Ábalos’ ministerial successor who launched the antecedent diplomatic kerfuffle between Sánchez and Milei by stealthily accusing the Argentinian President of taking “substances”, unsuccessfully sued Alvise’s attempts to have him resign by publishing his own share of compromising material. His best victory thus far, at a minimum for the least politically inclined share of his electorate, could however be publishing a video of Jenni Hermoso, the women’s football World Cup champion, light-heartedly giggling at being unwantedly kissed by Luis Rubiales a few hours earlier on the bus back from the final, an alleged abuse that was frontpage news for weeks — even as Alvise’s X account was suspended for spreading the evidence.

Other cases of holding politicians “accountable” are less heroic. Alvise went after former Health Minister Salvador Illa by publishing a positive PCR test, with Illa fully at his Ministry’s helm, that turned out to be fake, and falsely accused former Madrid mayor Manuela Carmena of using private care during the pandemic. He called out lawfare instead of reckoning the misfire, a claim that Spaniards are increasingly inclined to believe as Sánchez packs the courts, appoints friendly prosecutors and rushes the illegal — but politically logrolled — amnesty bill through a pliant Constitutional Court. When then-candidate Donald Trump replied to Hillary Clinton’s admonition in 2016 about his potential win, in a presidential debate, that “you’d be in jail” if it happened, his was an off-the-cuff remark. Alvise, instead, is ready to judicialize politics in retaliation against his enemies, blending information and judicial activism in his incendiary campaigns. “Pedro, warm up, you’re next!” he taunted at his election press conference. He has placed putting the Prime Minister behind bars as the end-all of his crusade, claiming that now-popular chants for his dismissal are not enough, as he would rush to the Dominican Republic scot-free to park away his millions.

Now that immunity looms when he takes up his seat in the latter half of July, he has even less of an incentive to be a serious lawmaker — if he ever had any. Alvise has placed the onus of his communications on hyperbolic bomb-throwing thus far, to the detriment of bread-and-butter issues. SALF is not registered as a party under domestic electoral law — and any national ambitions on Alvise’s part still seem far-fetched — but he has claimed to be uninterested in moving to Brussels either, at once too Islamic and cosmopolitan (court dates would necessarily make him a record abstentionist anyway). He hasn’t announced plans to join any pan-EU group and has pledged to randomly raffle the party’s entire EU funds and salaries to his supporters. His voters don’t seem too keen to measure the advisability of the ballot they’ve cast on the number of amendments, late-night negotiating sessions, or hearings he partakes in. Instead, Alvise’s self-declared intent is to plough ahead with his cyber-populist militancy, blowing the lid off on a stream of corruption he claims reaches so deep as to ignite a revolution if widely known. He has said he’ll release the most sensitive trove of audios and pictures on Telegram the moment he is sworn in.

Alvise’s frugality — and his crusading spirit — are incongruent at times. Whether for ill purposes or not, he has engaged in intentional disinformation. Beyond evidentiary and judicial misfires, he has routinely watermarked second-hand photos to make them appear his catch, and some of his co-candidates are being revealed to be either donors to his campaign or close acquaintances, despite his language on nepotism. He is not above enjoying the finer things in life, too, as evidenced by his clothing and some of the restaurants he’s been spotted dining at. His quip that, despite the party’s name, him and his voters were “celebrating” on election night sounded less ironic when a video-taped VIP reception at one of Madrid’s priciest nightclubs followed, where he was seen flanked — of all people — by Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, the epitome of the Spanish arriviste who made frontline news around 2014 for having posed for years as an intelligence agent with incendiary revelations even as he sought to solicitously befriend PP politicians and Royal House officials. Other fits of Alvise’s personality cult, narcissism and inconsistencies with his selfless anti-establishment ethos include having sought to register SALF as “Alvise”, and pitying himself for incurring yearly court of expenses “worth a Lamborghini”, a misplaced metaphor that contrasts poorly with the fact that he spent no money on rallies. An anonymous Twitter account by the handle @ElJudíoDeVox — “Vox’s Jew”—has been replicating Alvise’s methods for months in revealing a stream of similarly compromising, if unsubstantiated, kompromat, proving that chickens—or squirrels—always come home to roost.

Supporters demand little accountability of the man they trust to restore it to others

None of this seems to matter to his supporters, with his Telegram account consistently feeding the victimisation narrative. Supporters demand little accountability of the man they trust to restore it to others. They licence him to inflict harm on the system at whatever cost — a scorched earth strategy that they accept may devolve into the same post-truth and moral relativism Alvise lays at the media’s feet. Alvise won’t be a righteous crusader against the establishment so much as the least bad part of it. The one element of “the system” that Alvise seems soft on, ironically, is the one he could potentially benefit most from hitting. There’s little doubt that his electorate features mostly either fresh over-18s, high-testosterone men, or apathetic serial abstentionists — in both cases, digital natives that barely pick up a newspaper or watch TV — that Vox was best placed to mobilise before his rise. Others, however, defected away from Santiago Abascal’s party following last summer’s general election citing its support for vaccines, Ukraine and Israel, although that number seems to have turned out lower than the 16 per cent of Vox’s Alvise-curious electorate that some polls bandied about.

The two parties seem to keep a gentlemen’s agreement not to harm one another but could fall apart on any number of issues, particularly if Alvise migrates his ambitions to the Spanish arena. Rumour has it that he keeps a grudge not to have been welcomed into Vox when he tried. Curiously, Vox is often told it will fail, at its own scale, if it toes the line that has just worked for Alvise: refusing to pierce through traditional media. The former’s international networks could be at stake, too: though Vox and Alvise share a critique of Sánchez for being subordinated to Morocco — the latter claims the PM’s phone was hacked by King Mohammed VI’s intelligence services, thereby Spain’s diplomatic solicitousness to its southern neighbour — he is critical of Vox for incurring in not dissimilar forms of subordination to foreign powers, funded as Abascal’s party was by the Iranian resistance. Vox is even felt in some conspiratorially sovereigntist corners to tack too uncritically pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine. Alvise could one day attack Vox’s fondness towards Viktor Orbán, too, even as he generally sympathises with Hungary’s conservative governance model in isolation. Broadly, Alvise’s voters feel that Vox is too interested in forming pan-European alliances and snatching photo-ops, at the expense of addressing the electorate’s local rage. On Sánchez’s arch-controversial amnesty bill for Catalan convicts, Alvise has already prompted strategic anxiety: he has outflanked Vox by demanding that the King not sign the bill, even as his patriotism was thrown into doubt when he left the rallies held against it outside PSOE’s headquarters, leading up to Christmas, before police charged.

Spain is back to a three-way right being savvily used by the socialists in power

There’s also a sharp difference between Vox’s appeal to national-Catholics and the more pagan form of patriotism espoused by Alvise, with the latter more willing to cite homosexuals as direct victims of mass Islamic migration. He was once involved in sidewalk counselling in front of abortion clinics but claimed in 2020 he remained more liberal than conservative — and will likely not use the latter epithet anytime soon. Alvise has responded to accusations of entrenching Sánchez’s power by dispersing the right-wing vote — the same innuendos Vox faces, in turn, from PP leaders — by claiming that voters shouldn’t be patronised in instructional tones, and that EP elections are run on a single constituency where each party gets representation in line with its share of the suffrage, instead of depriving one another of seats in provinces allotted a limited number of them. Retaining some of the same futurist centrism that energised his involvement in Ciudadanos, Alvise often hits liberal tones of the anti-establishment spectrum, even as that same mystic has now been re-subsumed into PP. Though with a different rhetoric, the effect of the SALF list’s victory is not unlike that of Ciudadanos in its heyday: Spain is back to a three-way right being savvily used by the socialists in power, with Sánchez citing Alvise six times in Parliament at the first plenary session after the EP race. A meeting with Jorge Buxadé, Vox’s lead MEP, is yet to be made public, but is unlikely with PP.

Alvise has been taking on a messianic tone as Sánchez prepares a legislative package of outright censorship in the wake of his wife’s scandal, and the looming one surrounding his brother, hand-picked for public office for likely nepotistic reasons in socialist-run Badajoz. Sánchez’s enemy — which he makes no secret of wanting to ban — is the “mud-slinging factory” (máquina del fango) or “fachosphere” that is uncovering these scandals, which he closely associates with PP and Vox—his two main rivals for now — but which Alvise is in fact best placed to incarnate. The latter claims to hold a bombshell voice-note proving that penal magistrates at the Supreme Court take bribes from Russian mafiosi and has scheduled to automatically release it if and when he gets detained. Before the campaign, he polled a network of prostitutes asking them the nastiest things that politicians ever asked them to do — or saw them doing — and singled out, in an interview with fellow influencer Wall Street Wolverine, the alleged case of a coprophagic PP bigwig.

He claims the system’s counterpressure is being felt already. Vito Quiles, a similarly outré reporter who ran on Alvise’s list, has been denied his parliamentary press pass, and was soon after insulted on X by Óscar Puente as a “bag of excrement”. Alvise claims he is being watched, listened to, and approached by spies — even as he doesn’t seem to take the necessary caution to heart. He has nominally singled out police officers, prosecutors and judges with potentially career-ending accusations that few would sit idly by against — even if untrue. He could be taken on a wild night out, or have cocaine planted in his car. Many are urging him to keep “pulling the blanket” until hitting a hornet’s nest that can topple the government or send the whole system crumbling. Yet most are aware that he is risking his integrity, and that he could be either brought down, blackmailed or bought off at some point, much as France’s Coluche was in 1981, the comedian and founder of the Restos du Coeur who came up with the “tous pourris” phrase in his ephemeral race that year against François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Alvise’s rise … has reconfirmed that suspicion and cynicism run deep even among major parties

Whatever follows, Alvise’s rise will have unveiled some odd phenomena pulsing beneath Spain’s public sphere. Fuelled by Covid-19’s shock to a once high-trust social fabric, it has reconfirmed that suspicion and cynicism run deep even among major parties, enabling the insurgence of oddball characters against insufficient moderating antibodies. Overnight, meanwhile, Alvise has become the country’s most successful politician to date to have suggested that the country’s power balance isn’t cleanly revealed by vote totals, alleging an indoctrinating and widespread media bias — but also outright electoral fraud. He instructed his voters not to mail in their ballots, warning that postal authorities would rig them, and is now suing in electoral court for the strange growth of Carles Puigdemont’s Catalan coup-plotter party, which reaped 16.000 votes beyond its regional turf. Even if the barrel of Spain’s political life isn’t entirely spoiled, Alvise has convinced people—or exposed the persuasion—that there are too many bad apples in it, and something needs to be done that traditional parties are either unwilling or too compromised to undertake. Whether or not the persistent scandals in an impoverished country reflect a more corrupt political elite, the public has grown more intolerant of each of them since the permacrisis launched in 2008 and exacerbated by the pandemic.

Sánchez’s plans for a Bolivarian banana republic, the culmination of this unscrupulous backsliding, should in turn be the triggering factor for root-and-branch, broad-based reform. Yet Alvise’s voters view the two main opposition parties as tried-and-tested failures, even if their results had allowed them to take over the executive in July, and even if PP had shed its doctrinaire anti-populism. When Abascal became possibly the first party leader to reckon in an interview, in the early years of Vox’s surge into third spot, that granted, illegalities were being committed within his party unbeknownst to him as he spoke, he was not taking the moral high ground as intended but in fact naïvely mutating into the very establishment he claimed to despise. Alvise also accuses Vox of excelling at the nepotist farce instead of acting as an alternative beacon, with Abascal a veteran of chiringuitos in his pre-Vox rise through the ranks of… PP.

Alvise has loudened and amplified and stirred that distrust — while setting a precedent for diverting it to directions more unsettling than established parties ever imagined. He claims the state is not only embedded with influence-peddlers, wheelers and dealers, caciques and cronies. He alleges point-blank that extortioners, grifters, embezzlers, money launderers, narcos and human traffickers are also playing their hand — and that the cover-ups and mafia tactics are commensurately violent and mendacious. His share of fallacies notwithstanding, virtually all that comes to rock the Spanish polity these days — with the exception of amnesty — is channelled by Alvise’s hand. All trite social-scientific mantras about populist candidates undermining public trust aside, he has restored confidence among many who had lost it — some of whom would go full-on “politically dark” otherwise, but who now have recovered a measure of hope.

He may not be the public enemy — let alone saviour — he claims to be, and his move may turn out to be a limp source of disreputable agitation, powered by a serious but brief electoral tantrum. Yet Sunday was a teachable moment for “the system” — as for its most serious challengers: Vox, the disgruntled share of PP voters craving a more pugilistic tone against Sánchez, and the word-soup of acronyms in Vox’s network of alliances that grew across Europe on Sunday in spite, not because, of having emulated the establishment’s willpower. So far, few “new right” forces are choosing to look beyond their moderate but overall underwhelming victories. If they did, they’d learn they never should have narrowed the space for dissident voices, and that instead of adopting establishmentarian language against upstart candidates to their right, they should rediscover a commitment never to join the fiesta that politics is broadly perceived to be in places like Spain. An unsavoury circus that — one day — will finally end.