The rightwing rapper taking on Pedro Sánchez in Spain

Submission Statement: With her full-arm tattoos, glistening tooth gems and patriotic embrace of the national flag, Angie Corine, a ginger-haired rapper, is the new face of Spain’s insurgent populist right. At its vanguard is Vox, a party with a chance of forming a governing coalition with the conservative People’s Party (PP) after Pedro Sánchez called a snap election this week — a high-stakes gamble by a prime minister fighting for political survival.

Not only are more young people warming to the rightwing messages Corine puts to music, but the personal vitriol aimed at the Socialist leader has hit extraordinary new highs — even for a world accustomed to political rancour.

The rapper once called Sánchez a “border collie, a smart mutt” — alluding to an offensive nickname that puns on Pedro and perro (dog). She branded him a “psychopath” for promoting his summer playlist on Instagram while Ceuta, a Spanish African exclave, was reeling from the illegal arrival of more than 70,000 migrants.

Bitter divisions are ubiquitous in western democracies, but Spain is a stark example of what academics call “affective” polarisation — a version where rifts are rooted not in policy but in basic emotions of distrust and contempt.

Emotional polarisation tends to be starker when the enemy is seen as morally bankrupt or a threat to society. For Sánchez’s enemies, he ticks both those boxes.

He has been engulfed by corruption allegations against people close to him, including his wife Begoña Gómez. She denies wrongdoing and Sánchez says he is the victim of politicised judges waging “lawfare”. He is also accused of putting his “cronies” in charge of institutions that were once unpoliticised, such as the Bank of Spain, the state polling agency and telecoms company Telefónica.

Vox — a fiercely anti-immigration party founded in 2013 — was at 19 per cent in a 40dB opinion poll published on Friday. The PP, which takes a more moderate stance on immigration, stands at 32 per cent, while Sánchez’s Socialists are on 28 per cent.

According to one analysis, Sánchez elicits such hatred because he has reopened the wounds of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship. Under a 2022 law backed by the premier, the country created a registry of Franco’s victims, exhumed mass graves and sought to identify the remains of tens of thousands who “disappeared”.

But Luis Garicano (meta-commentary: he should be a flair for his work on human capital development at UChicago and his collaboration with Draghi), a former centrist Spanish MEP, rejected the idea that Spaniards are divided because of the civil war. “I’m almost 60 and grew up in a hopeful Spain, a country that was coming together. It wasn’t the reds versus the blues. This is a relatively new thing,” he said.

He traced the acrimony back to 2004, when a PP government wrongly blamed Eta for deadly train bombs planted by al-Qaeda. Then came a Socialist administration that mishandled a property bubble and a PP term defined by the Eurozone debt crisis and austerity.

Next was Sánchez, who is no innocent victim, said Garicano, now a public policy professor at LSE. “What Sánchez has wanted from the start is to make Vox the main opposition and to dig a trench between his voters and the right,” he said. “He wants to stop people moving from left to right by saying ‘look, if you go to the right you’re essentially voting for extremists that represent Franco and all that’.”

But he is playing with fire. Sánchez has condemned Abascal for spreading hate. “You’ve called me an autocrat, a dictator,” the premier said in parliament last month. “They even call me a dog.”