(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La enajenación anti Trumpista)

Spain has now lived for many years with a polarised society. The reasons are obvious. An increasingly radicalised left decided to break the rules of the game, the laws and the Constitution. It brought the reopening of the civil war into political struggle, and in more than twenty years a great deal of crockery has been broken. If we add to that the fact that literally everything the current socialist rulers say, under the greatest liar of them all, Pedro Sánchez, is a lie, and that Spain has never been robbed as it is being robbed now, both in volume and in brazenness, there are reasons for extreme hostility in politics and in the media. Add to that the growing and ever more credible fear that those who commit so many crimes in power will be capable of anything, of absolutely anything, in order not to lose it.

Now another factor has burst into Spanish politics, and it has not merely sharpened the confrontation. It has shifted the front lines, or perhaps it has simply made more visible the real lines of the political and ideological fronts in Spain. That added factor of polarisation is the American president Donald Trump. The 45th and 47th president of the United States arouses passions everywhere. In his own country, so many that people have long spoken of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which affects those whose hostility toward Trump has taken them to heights of irrationality that border on, or already amount to, deranged thought and conduct. That was already discussed during his first term, and it was also clear that this hostility found especially fertile ground in Europe and, of course, in Spain.

Trump is immensely polarising and generates as much enthusiasm and devotion as rejection, indignation and hatred. Even among many who applaud his policies and consider his intentions correct, who approve of his “script” as a good one, there are those who regret that he personally is a mistake of “casting”. Many believe that a more measured and less self-centred man would better play that role of leading a revolutionary change that resolutely fights the blights accumulated by the leftward drift across the West over the past 70 years. They believe that those personal traits and the overwhelming and chaotic elements of his passion, obsession and will endanger those political objectives of his, which in themselves are not only desirable for greater freedom and prosperity throughout the West, but absolutely necessary. Others of us think that all these defects are an inseparable part of his extraordinary qualities of tenacity, fighting spirit, endurance, drive, intelligence and enormous strength, which form part of a picture of absolutely extraordinary characteristics. And that without all his defects he could never have had the energy and the vision to deploy his very many virtues.

His overwhelming entry into this second term has “the world on tenterhooks” because many things have begun to happen that more and more citizens in the West wish would happen in their own countries, with a dismantling of the corruption, hypocrisy and ideological obediences that have taken root under the total social democratic hegemony imposed over the past half century in the West.

It is only logical that this should appal the social democratic forces that want to lead the West, supposedly by a gentler path than the communists, though that is no longer clear, toward a regime so egalitarian that it requires no freedoms. The governing elites believed they already had everything on track in this multilateral world in which soon nobody would think it necessary, nor would anybody be capable, to defend their identity, their history, their individuality, their nation, their family and their right to be different.

Social democracy today is Friedrich Merz as much as Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron as much as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Pedro Sánchez as much as Núñez Feijóo. By this I do not mean to equate one with another as persons, because some are criminals and some are not. But their political differences are of nuance and of pace in reaching the goal of equality and of their brave new world with absolute control of information and of wills. A few days ago the differences between socialists and People’s Party members became clear when they spoke about the delirious process of decarbonisation. Which is a pure programme for impoverishing the population by ideological decree. The People’s Party wants to ban the same things as the socialists, but three years later. These are the differences between the parties that govern in alliance in the European Union, which is today the spearhead of this process toward the final phase of socialism.

It is in order to interrupt that final phase radically and to correct the whole brutal Gramscian drift that the national parties have emerged all over Europe and the rest of the West. Trump is not one of them, because Trump emerges as a personal project with his ideological shifts and with the only real aim of serving the interests of the United States. The European national parties have had, since before Trump, very clear objectives in that defence of the interests of their respective nations. But Trump coincides in his objectives of renewal and reconstruction, and of war on hyper-regulation and on socialism, with the patriotic, national, conservative and sovereigntist parties of Europe.

Since in Spain Vox is the only party that carries the banner of the fight against that social democratic drift, it is VOX that receives all the charges of hostility that Trump generates around the world. It is true that there is also a great deal of political calculation, because there is a great deal of fear in the social democratic camp of the only party in Spain that is growing and the only one that offers a real alternative to what is in practice a single party with ill-matched tendencies. If with the PSOE’s civil-war rhetoric there were still doubts within the PP about where it stood, with Trump’s irruption the front has been clarified and the PP is with the PSOE against Trump and Abascal. The PP is with the PSOE, but also with the communists and even with the separatists, as was shown a few days ago in Rentería. And as we see in the European Parliament, where they all collaborate to deny posts and other rights to Vox and its allies.

Thus Santiago Abascal has become the target, on the one hand, of all the hatreds that Trump may generate through his policies, whose results, by the way, nobody yet knows because they are only beginning, but which everyone attacks and disparages. On the other hand, Abascal is also the head to be eliminated because he is the only leader in Spain who represents a national offer of reconstruction and freedom in the face of the socialist drift, which is ever more brutal and unscrupulous, and of the moral submission of a People’s Party that does not dare to oppose the party it always ends up imitating.

The aggressions, defamations, insults and outrages that are heard about Abascal and other Vox leaders often fall squarely within that delirium of Trump/Abascal Derangement Syndrome. Nevertheless, this whole process that is deranging so many has only just begun and there are many things that are going to move. And everything that Trump and the MAGA movement have endured, Abascal and Vox are prepared to withstand. For the first time in many years, and in the midst of enormous movements, dangers and upheavals, one can have hope and some certainty that, among the many things that are going to happen, quite a few will be very good.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.