The right abandons the Pucherazo conspiracy after years of raising doubts about the electoral system
The electoral setback is a ghost that the Spanish right-wing will invoke or bury, depending on whether the elections benefit or harm them. After several electoral events that openly warned of possible fraud in general, regional and municipal elections, both the PP and Vox have put away their preventive fraud after the European elections, in which both improved their results. Now it is the ultra Luis ‘Alviz’ Pérez who has taken the baton and turned the conspiracy flag into the central axis of the campaign that has given him three seats in the European Parliament, and developed an electoral strategy imported from Donald Trump in the United States, Javier Mieli in Argentina or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Conspiracy theories about manipulations and irregularities in the vote count have, first of all, a preventive intention: to warn voters in advance about possible electoral fraud in order to mobilize them. In recent years, both Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP and Vox have jumped on the bandwagon of questioning the results in advance and dropping the alleged scandal when election day was over. In previous European elections, the strategy has been a straight-up decline and in these elections they have found no reason to question the Spanish voting system.
“Sánchez is going to go with a coup attempt as soon as he arrives,” said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, at the campaign closing ceremony for the regional elections last May. A month and a half later, on the eve of the general election, the PP returned to the fray, this time with voting by mail. Feijoo even went so far as to directly address postmen to deliver “all the votes” despite “their bosses”. Once the various appointments with the 2023 elections were made, the right abandoned the conspiracy theory, based above all on the judicial action against the Coalition for Melilla and the suspicion of fraud in the vote by mail in Mojácar, which affected the PSOE and the PP.
The tactic is not an invention of the Spanish right. In the United States, Donald Trump has a long history of questioning elections, especially if he doesn’t like the result. In the run-up to Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, Trump invited thousands of his Twitter followers to “march on Washington” in protest of the electoral “farce”. In 2020, when he succumbed to Joe Biden and had to leave the White House, he did the same before and after the vote: “We will only lose these elections if they are rigged,” he said. Voting by mail, he claimed in the days that followed as his defeat became increasingly clear, was a “corrupt system”.
In Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro has extensive experience in challenging election results, particularly when he implied that his government was about to fall in favour of Lula da Silva. The far-right Brazilian political leader was condemned for raising unfounded questions about the credibility of the Brazilian electoral system in the 2022 elections, after President Javier Mailey denounced “massive fraud” in the second round of the 2023 Argentine elections, shortly after which he backed down and withdrew legal action. Since he has presided over the country, complaints of electoral corruption have not been repeated.
Vox has also developed these techniques in Spain until recently. Last March, the people of Santiago Abascal proposed an amendment to the electoral law and said that the postal vote counting system should be changed. The extreme parliamentary right has also been encouraging electoral fraud for years. In May 2019, a few days after the general election, they gained representation in Congress for the first time. “All the records were checked one by one. In the regional elections we discovered a very significant percentage of votes that had been counted incorrectly through companies contracted by the government,” said Javier Ortega Smith.
In previous elections a possible electoral setback was not part of the fears of right-wing parties. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Santiago Abascal avoided raising fears of government maneuvering to change the results of the election. The message that circulated in the 2023 electoral campaigns has diminished due to the amnesty, the judicial investigation of Begoña Gómez and other more profitable cases from an electoral point of view. And the baton has passed to other candidates and parties of the right who have been promoting this type of suspicion for years.
“Let’s clarify: Punch in Spain?”.
There is one candidate in the new Spanish political scene who has been encouraging these conspiracy theories for years, long before he contested the election: Luis ‘Alviz’ Pérez. On his Telegram channel, the current MEP elected for ‘Se Acabo la Fiesta’ has spent years spreading electoral fraud after electoral fraud, sometimes before the election takes place and sometimes during voting, spreading photos or videos without any context, according to the account to its five million subscribers, of attempts by Indra’s leadership to manipulate the election result.
The examples on his channel are still live. “The seats of the PSOE are increasing. Let’s be clear: Punch in Spain? He asked his followers when the counting of the last general election began. “The elections must be postponed and the Spanish electoral system must be certified without postal votes, with the experts of Indra and without tampering,” he said a few days before the regional and municipal elections in May.
Allusions to alleged corruption in the counting of votes, the transport of ballots or the management of voting by mail are something that cut through the messages on Elvis Pérez’s Telegram channel for years, but the extreme agitator stepped on the accelerator a few months ago, when he announced that he was running for the European elections. His great campaign claim is to associate himself with computer expert Gabriel Araújo and affirm that he has something called “Electo-VAR” and a software called “Scrutinia” that “controls Indra in the recalculation of electoral records.”
From the start of the elections, Elvis’ slogans took on any conspiracy theory deployed by political leaders around the world to question the election results. He called for “not voting through the post office, it is completely fraudulent” and focused his campaign on printing and distributing ballots “to avoid electoral sabotage.” “We are experiencing dozens of electoral crimes in the electoral count. We are recording everything to report to the court,” he said on polling day.
The surveys have given ‘The Party’s Over’ results far beyond any expectations: three MEPs and more than 800,000 votes. But this has not stopped Pérez’s allies from questioning the results of last June 9, which have nothing to do with his candidacy. His ally Expert has requested on the social network X that the seats of Podemos, Junts and PNV be withdrawn. Pérez, for his part, confirms that he is going to force investigations in “all the municipalities of this country” and, in the meantime, he has released a screenshot in which he confirms that the PSOE was the third force behind Vox and that its candidacy received two million more votes than the surveys indicate.