From 15M to the Fashosphere

There is surely a stark contrast between the present reality and the highly optimistic view of social media technology that circulated during the anti-austerity protest wave in 2011. At that time, sociologist Manuel Castells could argue in his seminal Networks of Hope and Outrage: Social Movments in the Internet Age that the occupation of city squares across Spain by the leaderless and spontaneous “Indignados” movement was made possible by the fact that social media networks constituted “spaces of autonomy, largely beyond the control of governments and corporations.” Nor was he alone. Enchanted by theories of “networked democracy” and the idea of the Arab Spring as “a Twitter revolution,” many on the Spanish left saw digital platforms as the basis for new “agoras” for public expression, which would enable forms of participatory decision-making and organization.

Seeking an electoral translation of this protest-movement wave, Podemos’s modus operandi was informed by much of this same naive techno-optimism. It also explored ways to combine these new mechanisms of digital democracy with the vertical nature of the party form. Yet for all the energy the Left spent during the 2010s debating the merits of different participatory forms of networked organization, the trajectory of social media over the last decade has ultimately favored the rise of reactionary digital subcultures. This has not been the rise of a “networked people” plugged into new political “software.”

In this sense, the emergence of Vox in 2018 demonstrated the far right’s growing ability to capitalize on social media platforms’ “attention economy” model, in which the capacity to drive engagement through inflammatory controversies is treated as a valuable commodity. Even beyond the ideological preferences of Silicon Valley oligarchs, their profit-seeking companies have no incentive to crack down on hate speech and disinformation while their algorithms prioritize polarizing content and separating people into self-reinforcing echo chambers of news and memes.

A further element here is the far greater resources available to the far right for the industrial-scale production of arresting visual content on platforms like TikTok, or indeed for funding so-called “premium trolls” like Alvise. In this sense, the gap between the far right’s digital influence and that of progressive forces in Spain owes less to parties than the reach of a wider ecosystem of reactionary influencers and content creators known as the “fachosfera” (the fascist-sphere).

The forty most popular far-right YouTubers in Spain each have over one hundred thousand subscribers, with a combined total of ten million followers between them — as they produce bizarre spectacles mixing xenophobia, very diverse entertainment formats, and far-right propaganda. Some evangelize the ideas of Jordan Peterson while stuffed into spandex bodysuits, whereas others team up to stream their creation of Minecraft metaverses — in which they simulate an anarcho-capitalist dreamland or erect a new virtual Valley of the Fallen mausoleum to Spain’s past dictator, Francisco Franco.

The Telegram Party

Alvise is representative of this world of far-right digital celebrities. After having worked as an advisor for the liberal-rightist Ciudadanos party, he rose to prominence in the first months of the pandemic through an anti-lockdown campaign that he mounted both online and with billboards in major cities — which depicted center-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez as a 1984-esque Big Brother figure above the slogan “A good citizen obeys.” His Telegram channel now has more than half a million followers, ten times the number subscribing to Vox’s channel (which has the largest number among any political party) — and it receives up to five million visualizations a day. On Instagram, he has more than double Sánchez’s number of followers, and three times the number of Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias.

While many influencers offer their followers cooking recipes or pet photos, Alvise has circulated seemingly hacked material, cleverly crafted hoaxes, and gotcha videos where he harasses progressive politicians, his trademark as a “content creator.” This output is framed as “anti-corruption activism” against both the deep state and a privileged “caste” of politicians, big media, and judges. The term casta was first introduced into Spanish politics with Podemos’s anti-austerity discourse. Yet its purpose for Alvise is not to empower a disenfranchised majority against an economic elite but to camouflage his ideologically far-right convictions as a defense of “the people” against hidden, shadowy powers.

Like YouTubers who nickname their subscribers, Alvise affectionately refers to his followers as his “little squirrels.” Through Telegram, he has been able to disseminate his constant stream of disinformation directly to their devices, creating an apparent connection “without intermediaries” with this mass of supporters, outside of the public gaze. This manufactured sense of intimacy produced by the direct-messaging app is heightened by the conspiratorial nature of the content. As author Jorge Dioni noted in El País, by gaining access to “the information that no one else has, it makes [you] special” — part of a select community that “knows what is really going on.”

Not setting foot in a TV studio during the European Parliament campaign (or for that matter, organizing a single traditional campaign rally), Alvise also made his Telegram channel the backbone of his electoral strategy — betting that its significant reach among certain demographics and the app’s sense of privacy offered him the means for an unconventional national breakthrough. The Party’s Over’s only offline activity during the campaign was a series of “meetups” with supporters in prominent city locations where hundreds would gather for selfies with the influencer having received the location via Telegram, in now-familiar scenes of Internet fandom.

Alvise’s poll surge depended on his strong appeal amongst a very niche electorate — even as an unusually high percentage of the wider public had never heard of him prior to his bombshell result.  According to El País’s analysis of preelection polling, his party’s voters are largely urban and overwhelmingly young and male. Among those who intended to vote for it, 75 percent were men and 77 percent were under the age of forty-four, with the platform calculated to have won more votes among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds than Podemos and Sumar combined.

The radicalization of younger, male right-wing voters in Spain has also driven Vox’s rise in recent years, but Alvise’s wildly anti-political positioning and his conspiratorial narratives have a distinct appeal among this highly connected and online constituency. Harnessing the marketing playbook of digital celebrities, Alvise placed himself at the center of his campaign, claiming to be in possession of hidden truths capable of overthrowing the government.

In this respect, he asked his followers for their vote so he could gain a MEP’s legal immunity — thus allowing him to continue revealing documents and “[wiretapped] audios subject to state secrecy and data privacy laws” from the floor of the European Parliament. “I am not here to reform the system,” he asserted during the campaign, “I have come to blow it up from the inside.”

A Sustainable Project?

In reality, the influencer is currently facing at least nine legal cases for, among other things: spreading public health misinformation during the pandemic, disclosing police reports to fuel racist hoaxes, publishing private photos of politicians, journalists and even the prime minister’s daughters, as well as making false accusations of electoral fraud and vote-buying. Many have speculated that his main motivation for standing in the European elections was to ensure his immunity from these already-mounting criminal investigations.

Beyond this, however, the future prospects of Alvise’s makeshift electoral platform remain unclear. Last week, in his first major post-election interview with a mainstream outlet, he told El País he was planning to run in the next general election “so as to save my house, which is Spain.” In the same interview, he acknowledged that his platform converged with Vox when it came to the issue of “massive, uncontrolled illegal immigration” but insisted his extreme-right rival also formed part of “the criminal partitocracy that has been robbing us Spaniards since the transition to democracy” and that has been “living off the teat of the state.”

In this respect, while a future electoral coalition with Vox cannot be ruled out, it would likely limit his ability to pose as a fearless political outsider and blunt his antiestablishment credentials. That Alvise himself has had a long career working in party politics and has been funded by extremist Catholic organizations like HazteOir does not in itself negate his ability to take on this role. Furthermore, the trend elsewhere in Europe on the far right is toward the emergence of two or more parties in this political space — one more traditionalist and the other positioning itself as more clearly anti-system.

Indeed, in the recent Catalan regional elections, a far-right pro-independence force, Aliança Catalana also broke through — pointing toward this growing diversification on the hard right beyond Vox’s stuffy post-Franco authoritarianism. Together, Vox and The Party’s Over secured 15.2 percent of the vote in June’s European poll compared to Vox’s 12.3 percent in general elections last year.

The degree to which Alvise can hold on to his electorate in a general election remains to be seen. There, unlike in the low-stakes European elections, tactical voting becomes a major factor. But the significant financial resources The Party’s Over is now entitled to from its three seats in the European Parliament, as well as the sudden wave of media attention it is receiving, could provide it with a basis from which to build a more sustainable electoral project going forward. With Spain divided into multi-seat electoral districts, it could potentially secure MPs in Spain’s major urban areas — which return a higher number of MPs than rural districts.

A decade ago, Spain was often cited as a rare European country without far-right MPs. Now, after years of radicalization within the country’s right-wing bloc, including in the mainstream conservative Partido Popular, we face a new scenario of having to confront a multiheaded hydra. Running multiple candidacies might risk dividing the Right’s vote in less populated districts. Yet with the leaders of Sumar and Podemos continuing to navel gaze as they drift ever more toward the electoral margins, the country’s increasingly reactionary right-wing bloc can afford to experiment with how best to mobilize its combined forces.