In 2023, I warned in The American Spectator that a new far-left dictatorship was closing in on Europe, referring to the extremist drift of Pedro Sánchez’s government in Spain. Beyond being bombarded with insults from social media trolls (three years earlier, I had revealed in the newspaper ABC that more than 40 percent of Pedro Sánchez’s social media followers were fake; draw your own conclusions), centrists and many right-wingers obsessed with moderation, the sort who always end up complicit in evil, criticized my article as exaggerated, biased, toxic, and presumably bad for one’s cholesterol and the damned ozone layer.
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Since 2023, the article has gone viral every few months, bringing a fresh wave of comments. These days, hardly anyone calls it an exaggeration. Instead, most people say that the prophecy is on the verge of coming true in full. If there is still some idiot in Brussels claiming that it is an exaggeration to speak of the advent of a far-left dictatorship in Spain, he might want to consider these two news items from the past 24 hours. (RELATED: Welcome to the Far Right)
The Supreme Court has just halted the electoral effects of the “Grandchildren’s Law” championed by Sánchez, granting a request for measures filed by Vox, the rising right-wing party in Spain led by Santiago Abascal. The “Grandchildren’s Law” is a scheme devised by Sánchez to tamper with the electoral roll ahead of the 2027 elections. It sought to grant Spanish citizenship (and voting rights) to hundreds of thousands of people born abroad and living outside Spain.
Sánchez has no chance of winning a general election … if it is a clean one.
The government’s pretext for this law is that it aims to grant citizenship to the relatives (read: “grandchildren”) of those exiled for political, ideological, religious, or sexual-orientation reasons. Put another way: Sánchez expects Latin Americans, unlike Spaniards, to vote for him in droves, especially those descended from Civil War exiles. The question all of Spain is asking is this: Why should an Argentine who has never visited Spain (and never will) be able to vote and help decide who governs the country, with exactly the same rights as any Spaniard living here, working and paying (or rather, suffering) taxes? The answer is simple: Sánchez has no chance of winning a general election … if it is a clean one.
The other piece of news has a similarly Bolivarian whiff. The newspaper El Confidencial has just revealed that the government has been compiling a dossier on journalists, cataloging and classifying them according to their ideology. This secret document, prepared by the Ministry of the Interior, contains detailed information on dozens of journalists, including photographs and comments such as “aligned with right-wing positions,” “highly critical of the amnesty [for the Catalan coup plotters],” “defends socialist policies,” “avowedly anti-Sánchez,” “far-right,” or “left-wing, but has shifted toward conservative positions.” (RELATED: Spain’s Far‑Left Dictatorship Has Become a Reality)
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The government says that the dossier “has no major implications,” so we are expected to believe that its creation — along with the order given to those compiling it to keep it secret — is simply a typical Ministry of the Interior pastime, akin to playing golf on the premises, playing Minesweeper, or squeezing stress balls.
The Spanish government, then, has reached this point, far beyond what many imagined. It is looking for ways to manipulate the electoral roll for its own benefit in the next general election and, in yet another attempt to control public discourse, is compiling blacklists of troublesome journalists, complete with names, photographs, and a nice personalized note about each one’s degree of affinity and trustworthiness.
But no, of course I cannot speak of an incipient dictatorship because we still harbor a tiny hope that Sánchez will call free and fair elections, or rather that he will not have time to rig them as he would like, because dissident journalists are not being thrown in jail yet, and because (this is my favorite stupid phrase) “the EU would never allow it.” I have heard that phrase about ten million times, and I have a question: What has the EU done in the face of Sánchez’s slide toward totalitarianism across every conceivable sphere? Can we now speak of a far-left dictatorship backed by the center-right and social democrats in Brussels? You decide for yourself.
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