A crowd of students is gathered outside the campus of CEU San Pablo, a private university in Madrid, waiting for Vito Quiles. When the 25-year-old far-right activist arrives, a celebratory chant goes up, albeit one aimed at Spain’s Socialist prime minister: “Pedro Sánchez, hijo de puta!” (Pedro Sánchez, son of a whore!”).
To cheers and applause, Quiles goes inside to take part in an onstage interview. Such is the demand to see him that many students are turned away.
“We are on the right side of history,” he tells the room, responding to questions put to him by an anchor, as a grim-faced bodyguard stands nearby.
He adds: “In many situations it’s very difficult to give an opinion without being told you’re a fascist. I want to make clear to youngsters who think differently that they are not alone.”
READ MORE
Quiles is Spain’s latest far-right phenomenon, whose social media presence and provocative public persona have given him something like rock-star status among many of the country’s youth.
“The way young people think is changing; a lot of us are tired of the same old thing,” says Antonio Aranguren, a student at the event. “Vito Quiles is one of the few people of our generation who is trying to change things.”
“I identify with him, he’s calling for freedom,” says Julia Monje, another student.
Yet many others believe Quiles is part of a deeply disturbing phenomenon that is a throwback to the ideas and values of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco.
Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death and, after half a century of democratic consolidation, there are concerns that Spain is in danger of forgetting its own recent past.
“There is a great deal of ignorance within Spanish society, particularly among young people, about what the Franco regime meant,” says Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book on the European far right.
“That ignorance makes it easier for a kind of whitewashing of Francoism to become possible.”
Vito Quiles is keen to compare himself to Charlie Kirk, the American activist-polemicist who was assassinated in September. In recent weeks, the Spaniard has been carrying out a Kirk-inspired round of visits to universities, which he has called the “Combative Spain Tour”.
The difference with the American is that the public campuses he visits have not given him permission to speak – they say he has not requested authorisation, while he says his freedom of speech is being curtailed. Most of Quiles’s appearances at these venues have consisted of him delivering diatribes against the left through a megaphone, sometimes cloaked in the Spanish flag, as he is roared on by those watching, mainly young men.
Quiles describes himself as a journalist. However, he has a political background, having a stint as press officer for Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF), a far-right party that won 800,000 votes in the last European elections. In recent months SALF has been beset by a series of legal actions against its leader, Alvise Pérez, for alleged illegal financing, harassing his own party colleagues and distributing false information about a Catalan politician.
Meanwhile, the far-left Podemos party has filed a complaint against Quiles for allegedly stirring up racist hatred in the southern town of Torre Pacheco in the summer, where there were disturbances involving immigrants.
At the Madrid university event, Quiles says he defends young people, the family, freedom of speech, low taxes and respect for the constitution. Only occasionally does he stray into overtly far-right terrain, such as when he warns of the threat of immigrants who rape Spanish women.
At a university in Málaga in October, things took a dark turn when some of his supporters waved pre-constitutional flags, associated with the Franco regime. Others raised their arms in the fascist salute and sang the Francoist anthem Cara al Sol. There were similar scenes when he appeared outside the university of Granada.
A recent poll published by national broadcaster RTVE suggests such attitudes are not exceptional, with 23 per cent of Spaniards under the age of 25 expressing a favourable view of the dictatorship. At the same time, Spain’s prime far-right force, Vox, has been rising in polls, which show that it is currently the most popular party among the young.
Much of this phenomenon is due to social media presence, says Fernández Vázquez.
“There is a sort of chorus, a polyphony of voices speaking the language of the far right in the media and on platforms where young people get their information or their entertainment,” he says.
He also points to a backlash against Spain’s recent legislation relating to sexual equality and consent, introduced by the left and which the far right tends to portray as unfair on men.
With Vox, Quiles and their allies casting the ideas and values of the left and the struggling Sánchez government as the oppressive mainstream, for many young Spaniards, rebellion now means being on the radical right.
Sánchez’s administration has done more than any other to tackle the legacy of Franco and the 1936-39 civil war that preceded the dictatorship. In 2019 it oversaw the exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum in the mountains north of Madrid that glorified his legacy, and their reburial in more low-key cemetery.
Earlier this year the government reached an agreement with the Vatican under which the pro-Franco prior who administered the site was removed while the Benedictine community remained. This month the winning bid to redesign and “resignify” the mausoleum, whose grandiose architecture projects Franco’s National-Catholicism ideology, has been announced, with a new interpretation centre to be part of the €26 million makeover. The renovated site will “invite dialogue and a more plural, more democratic vision,” according to Iñaqui Carnicero, the government’s head of urban planning and architecture.
In 2022 Sánchez’s government pushed through parliament a democratic memory law, declaring the Franco regime illegal and deeming the public defence of it a criminal offence. The legislation allowed children and grandchildren of Spaniards who were forced into exile during the civil war and dictatorship to claim Spanish citizenship.
In addition, the law gave the state responsibility for identifying and exhuming the remains of the victims of Franco in unmarked graves, who campaigners estimate number more than 100,000.
Fernando Martínez López, minister for democratic memory, said the legislation “puts the victims at the centre of public policy” for the first time.
But any government initiative in the area of historical memory tends to face resistance from the centre-right and hostility from the far right. Both oppose what they see as the unnecessary digging up of the past and use of it to present the left as morally superior.
And yet, it is often the far right that reminds Spaniards of the dictatorship. The mayor of the Andalusian town of Puente de Génave, Francisco García Avilés, of Vox, recently caused a stir by printing several hundred 2026 calendars bearing a portrait of Franco and the words “Up with Spain!” The mayor said criticism of the calendar was simply because “a few traumatised people can’t accept the fact they lost a war in 1936”.
There are those who feel that, rather than coming back to haunt Spain, the Francoist mindset never went away.
“This country has faked a disconnection from the dictatorship,” says Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH). He points to the continuing existence of monuments built to glorify the regime, or streets named in honour of Franco and his allies, such as one in Madrid named after the Blue Division, the Spaniards who fought for Hitler.
For more than two decades Silva and his association have been tirelessly campaigning on this issue and carrying out painstaking work exhuming unmarked graves of victims of Franco and his regime and identifying the remains through DNA testing – until recently with barely any government support.
“In the last few years this country has managed not to provide justice to victims but at least to make them visible, although you can’t say the same for those responsible [for human rights abuses],” he says, pointing to the fact that legal obstacles have prevented Spain from carrying out a single prosecution against members of the regime.
Silva sees the shadow of Franco still hindering many areas of Spanish life: preventing youngsters from protesting more at their precarious living conditions, or protecting corrupt politicians and members of the Catholic Church who might otherwise face abuse charges. Four decades of Franco, Silva says, instilled “a culture of impunity” to which Spain is still in thrall.
Despite his pessimism, there are youngsters who are pushing back against the wave of far-right support and nostalgia for the Franco years.
Marina Sanmor is a political science and law student who has taken the fight to the likes of Quiles with videos on social media portraying the agitator as someone who is taking advantage of the current climate despite lacking clear political ideas.
“A very big chasm has opened up for our generation in which we have no stability, we don’t have housing, there’s no prospect of a stable future,” she says. “And within that instability, all sorts of hate speech has crept in and, above all, rhetoric that defends Francoism.”
