Spanish politics often offers glimpses of the future. What happens today in one autonomous community can become tomorrow the pattern of national governance. The recent pact between PP and Vox in Extremadura is not just any agreement. It is the clearest articulation so far of a project founded on national priority. Here an explicit Iberian chauvinism begins: the Spanish adaptation of the European “national preference,” where access to rights shifts from universal to selective. A plausible preview of what could happen in Spain if polls projecting a joint majority of both formations in 2027 come to pass.
It is worthwhile to take this exercise of political fiction as an analysis grounded in facts, without exaggeration. The programmatic document signed in Extremadura, which goes beyond merely securing an investiture, defines a government model that introduces a qualitative and quantitative leap compared to previous experiences.
¿Cómo convierte el pacto PP-Vox en Extremadura la “prioridad nacional” en política pública?
Cuantitativo, because the radical right enters the Executive with a vice presidency and with key competences such as social services, family, or the so-called “administrative deregulation”. In other words, Abascal’s party does not govern only symbolic power: it administers the welfare of the citizens. A label —the deregulation— that, beyond its technical look, can translate into less public oversight. Its effects are not theoretical: in the city of Alicante, the elimination of regulatory filters in affordable housing after the regulatory changes that followed the departure of the government of Ximo Puig and Compromís facilitated allocations to family environments and networks of affinity, evidencing the risks of deregulation without strengthening supervision. That is, Vox gains real budgetary power and the ability to directly influence daily life.
Quasi translated, because many of its proposals — until now marginal or rhetorical — become public policy.
“Access to rights is no longer based on need or resident status to depend on national rootedness”
The text places immigration as a transversal framework that conditions housing, social aid, health care, or education. The introduction of the principle of “national priority” in access to public resources breaks with one of the pillars of the liberal state: equality before the law. This is a matter that goes beyond hardening migration policies because it redefines the criteria of social citizenship. Therefore, access to rights is no longer based on need or the resident condition to depend on national rootedness. It is a paradigm shift that inaugurates, in Spain, that Iberian chauvinism already visible in other latitudes.
Qué anticipa para España el modelo de PP y Vox en Extremadura
Projected at a national scale, the model sketches a country where access to public housing, subsidies, or services is hierarchized by origin and belonging. The welfare state loses its universal character to become a selective device: an exclusionary patriotism that redefines who deserves public protection and who is left out.
But the shift is not only in migration policy. It also extends to economic and energy policy. The Extremadura joint government program proposes barriers to the expansion of renewable energies and an explicit defense of the primary sector against the 2030 Agenda or the European Green Deal.
This point is especially significant in the Spanish context. Spain has managed in recent years to position itself as one of the most cost-competitive electricity countries in Europe, largely thanks to the boost from renewables. Introducing regulatory or political brakes on that development not only strains climate commitments, but can jeopardize energy autonomy and economic competitiveness, with structural costs.
“Far from moderating the radical right, this is the one that defines the perimeter of what is possible for the traditional right”
The important thing is not the detail of each measure, but the logic behind them: governance in exchange for programmatic radicalism. This framework suggests that, far from moderating the radical right, it is this one that defines the perimeter of what is possible for the traditional right.
And that perimeter does not start from zero. It rests on a prior trajectory of weakening the public sector in various territories governed by the PP: healthcare waiting lists measured in months, privatization processes without effective controls, underfunded universities, social services with insufficient resources, and a generation of young people who have known more precarity than prosperity. In that context, the promise of tax cuts while improving public services is, in many cases, the oldest of political fictions—and dead ends.
Politics, however, does not always follow the logic of data. Frames matter greatly. In that realm, Vox manages to press its agenda, while the PP bears the cost of moving toward positions that test its liberal, pro-European and pluralist tradition.
“The most relevant element of what happened in Extremadura is the loss of centrality of the Partido Popular”
This is, probably, the most relevant element of what happened in Extremadura: the loss of centrality of the PP. We are not facing a pact of mutual moderation, but an asymmetry where the force shaping the program is the radical right. In contrast to Giorgia Meloni’s strategy in Italy — which has sought some pragmatic adaptation to European institutions — the model that emerges here is a hybrid between Marine Le Pen on the economic front and Viktor Orbán on the symbolic and cultural front. In the latter case, some consequences have already been observed: according to international indicators such as V-Dem or Transparency International, Hungary has experienced in the last decade a deterioration of the quality of democracy, higher levels of perceived corruption, and a relative economic stagnation within the EU, accompanied by population decline through emigration.
If this is the “minimum common denominator” of governance, as Santiago Abascal himself has noted, the inevitable question is: what would happen in Spain with a PP-Vox parliamentary majority approaching two hundred seats?
The answer, though not linear, points to a deep reconfiguration of the political system. Not necessarily through abrupt ruptures, but through a progressive hollowing out of its norms and balances. A shift in which exception becomes routine and what today is presented as a contingent negotiation solidifies into a structure of power.
Extremadura, in that sense, is an indication of a model change. It foreshadows a possible Spain in which governance is no longer built from the center, but from margins that have ceased to be margins. But it is also a first step in the institutionalization of a doctrine — Iberian chauvinism — which, after years of being seen as a slogan, has managed to install itself as a form of government.
