The international alliances of the Spanish far right
Spain’s far right has lagged behind its counterparts in other European countries in gaining a foothold in Spanish political institutions. After the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, far-right platforms experienced failure after failure, and only starting in 2011 did they begin to gain representation in small town councils. Academics like Xavier Casals described this anomaly as an 'absent presence', meaning that the extreme right existed with a subset of voters, but these were mostly encompassed within the main conservative party, the Popular Party (PP). It was only in 2018 that Vox burst onto the scene and into several institutions, first in Andalusia and later across Spain.