Right Wing Party Vox Wants Spain’s Daily Applause to Medical Staff to End

Instead the party-leader suggests that neighbours should bang on their pots and pans to signal their discontent and opposition to the current government.

VOX is annoyed at the applause given every evening to health professionals at eight in the afternoon from the balconies and windows of Spanish residents, a gesture which has continued since the beginning of the pandemic and unites neighbours despite their ideologies or beliefs.

For weeks, supporters of the ultra-right party have received messages on social networks protesting against this spontaneous demonstration and now, their official channel, El Toro TV, is doing the same.

Their party leader, Santiago Abascal, has critically attacked the lack of independence in the media and then vetoed journalists during his live appearances, however, he has proposed this new TV channel, owned by a Vox candidate, be the ideal communication model to follow.

The reason why Abascal wants to put an end to the daily applause dedicated to the medical staff is because this supposedly makes it difficult to use balconies and windows to protest against Pedro Sanchez.

A Vox MEP, Hermann Tertsch, called for a pots and pan protest and demanded “less applause to the medics and less of the Resistire [I Will Resist, a song which has become the anthem for the quarantine] and more resistance.”

“I hear the saucepans of indignation from home. The Spaniards have run out of patience with this negligent and sectarian government that has only brought death and ruin. It has endured enough” party leader, Santiago Abascal, tweeted on Saturday.

At the beginning of the confinement, Vox encouraged casseroles against the government, but proceeded to draw back because of the little support they had. After six weeks of confinement and more than 23,000 victims, he believes that the climate has changed and now they can be successful.

Vox has been using increasingly critical rhetoric regarding their discourse about the State of Alarm, which the group’s general secretary, Macarena Olona, described as “house arrest.”

Another party spokesman, Jorge Buxade excused those who had broken the quarantine rules by saying that the current situation in Spain is comparable to the one described by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984. However, when analysing this comparison it becomes rather paradoxical considering that the British writer was anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist, who defended the Spanish republic against Franco; and Buxade on the other hand has not been shy about his past and affinity with the Franco era.