The difference is that in working-class neighbourhoods, rather than making noise with pots, people are building incredible networks of solidarity, mutual care and support.
With hard times coming ahead, only solidarity will save us from the ruins. Long queues in foodbanks and support networks indicate that people are beginning to starve in many areas of every city. Uncertainty appears enhanced as a material way of being for many precarious popular classes who lost their jobs and do not know if they will ever return to work. While neighbours are supporting neighbours, the political opportunism of the right is seeking to catalyse the social catastrophe.
Covid19, the far-right and upper-class revolt in Spain — Interregnum
After the right-wing’s performance in the midst of the COVID19 outbreak -with figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jair Bolsonaro leading the way -one could reasonably think that popular support for the far-right would plunge after the crisis.
At the very least, that was my deluded hope in the Spanish context, in which particularly VOX[i] -but also the whole right-wing circus- has been accumulating one foolish and impertinent appearance after another. Just to give an example, the voices of the Spanish right -both the ‘old’ one (the conservative Partido Popular) and the ‘not-that-old’ one (VOX or Ciudadanos) – have repeatedly blamed the feminist demonstrations held on the 8th of March as responsible for the exponential outbreak of the virus.
The fact that this same day VOX organised a multitudinous antifeminist meeting –whereupon leaders like Santiago Abascal or Javier Ortega Smith, who shook hands with all the attendants, were diagnosed with coronavirus- never stopped the most rancid right from making such senseless accusations.
Overall, the actions of the far-right these days merit an entire analysis that I am not able to cover here. The reason that I am writing today refers to some recent events that have been taking place since last week. With almost 30.000 deaths in official statistics, and coinciding with the first government measures easing the quarantine, Spain is witnessing a sort of ‘upper-class revolt’ in which ladies and gentlemen from the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the country are taking over the streets in their Francoist flags, suits, ties and heels demanding freedom and the immediate dismissal of the government.
This image of the same fascists that blamed feminist demonstrations now rallying in the street- during their daily allowance outside the house for exercise- captures the incongruencies of a rancid extreme right that, far from being losing its support, is fully aware that it’s time for class struggle. The Madrilenian ‘Barrio de Salamanca’ -the neighbourhood with the highest GDP per capita- has become the spatial reference of these ‘revolts’, albeit the reality is that they have spread to other -mostly wealthy- areas across the country’s geography.
This discontent was capitalised on by the far-right party VOX, who promoted a national “caravan demonstration” which took place on Saturday in different cities of the state “in the name of Spain and freedom” and demanded the immediate resignation of the government, while obstructing the circulation of ambulances and insulting health workers standing in their way as a form of protest.
Continue reading “Covid19, the far-right and upper-class revolt in Spain —”
President Donald Trump and Tony Stallings, vice president of integrated supply chain at Honeywell International Inc., right, interrogate a worker about his job during a tour of a Honeywell plant that manufactures personal protective equipment, May 5, 2020, in Phoenix, as Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows watch. | Evan Vucci / AP
