Spain’s hard-right Vox party joins a regional government

A DAY AFTER Marine Le Pen reached the second round in France’s presidential election, the regional parliament in Spain’s Castilla y León approved a new government, the country’s first to include Vox, a hard-right party. Visiting the region for the investiture vote, Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, took time to tweet congratulations to Ms Le Pen on a “great result”, saying France, like the rest of Europe, faced a choice between “sovereignty and reindustralisation or progressivist globalisation that is ruining us”.It is easy to see Vox as the renaissance of a far right that never disappeared even after Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator for nearly 40 years, died in 1975. Mr Abascal calls the current government the worst in 80 years—that is, worse than Franco’s. Vox wants to replace a law on gender-based violence with one on “intra-family violence”, turning the focus away from male perpetrators. It wants to recentralise Spain, eliminating the 17 powerful regional governments (like the one it has just joined in Castilla y León). This makes Vox radioactive to regional nationalists in places like Catalonia and the Basque Country.