The political influence of the radical right: Vox and the Navarrese parties

Abstract

Since the breakthrough of Vox at the Andalusian Parliamentary elections in 2018, significant changes have been taking place in the Spanish political system. We hereby seek to analyse if Vox’s emergence has had any kind of impact/effect in the Navarrese political system, either in the realm of party/electoral competition dynamics or, alternatively, in the way mainstream parties handle the radical right’s typical issues. To this end, we go through the electoral manifestoes of the Navarrese political parties which managed to obtain parliamentary representation at the 2019 elections and review also how some electoral alliances were established. Although somehow tentatively, we conclude that it may be too soon to find any clear impact of Vox’s issues on the other parties’ manifestoes; yet, there is some evidence of a counter-discourse on immigration issues; whereas the strategic agreement to set the alliance Navarra Suma was more clearly oriented towards avoiding vote fragmentation and/or any reduction in the number of seats to be gained by the conservative, rightist forces which may eventually make government formation more difficult.