Santiago Abascal

Santiago Abascal Conde (born 14 April 1976) is a Spanish politician and since September 2014 the leader of the right-wing political party Vox. Abascal is a member of the Congress of Deputies representing Madrid since 2019. Before the creation of Vox, Abascal was long a member of the centre-right People's Party, served as legislator in the Basque Parliament, founded the Spanish nationalist Foundation for the Defense of the Spanish Nation (Fundación para la Defensa de la Nación Española, or DENAES) and exerted the role of director of publicly funded entities of the Community of Madrid.

Early life
Abascal was born in Bilbao. He descends from a line of prominent politicians in the Province of Álava: his father Santiago Abascal Escuza was a politician and a member of the People's Party, and his grandfather Manuel Abascal Pardo was the mayor of Amurrio from 1963 to 1979, during the dictatorship of Franco and Spanish transition to democracy. Because of their political work, Abascal's family was routinely threatened by the terrorist group ETA.

Political career
Abascal became a member of the People's Party when he was 18, in 1994. He was city councillor of Llodio for two terms (1999–2007). He served in the Basque Parliament from January 2004 to February 2005 representing Álava. He later served again in the regional legislature from October 2005 to January 2009.

After he left Basque politics, Esperanza Aguirre, the regional president of the Community of Madrid, hired him for the post of director of the Data Protection Agency of the Community of Madrid (2010–2012). Abascal was later appointed to another post as Director of the Foundation for Patronage and Social Sponsorship (2013), a publicly funded entity without known activity during Abascal's spell.

Abascal left the PP in 2013 and helped to found a new party, Vox, which was formed on the same day that the Foundation for Patronage and Social Sponsorship dissolved. After Vox's bad result in the May 2014 European Parliament election in which it failed to obtain any seats, inner strife followed between a faction represented by party members such as Ignacio Camuñas, José Luis González Quirós and Alejo Vidal-Quadras, and a hardline faction, featuring Abascal along with other figures of the DENAES Foundation. The moderate faction became estranged from the party, and Abascal became the new president on 20 September 2014.

Abascal is a member of the Congreso de los Diputados representing Madrid since May 2019. His party came third in the election for the 14th Congreso, characterized by the BBC as a "far-right surge".

During the 2020 and 2021 electoral campaigns for regional elections in the Basque Country and Catalonia, multiple electoral events featuring Abascal as one of the speakers were attacked by political opponents on the premises of Vox's electoral events in the provinces being acts of provocation.

Political positions
Abascal's political programme for 2018 includes the expulsion of all illegal immigrants, the construction of "impassable walls" in the Spanish African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the prohibition of the teaching of Islam, the exaltation of "national heroes", the elimination of all regional parliaments and opposition to Catalan nationalism. He used anti-Muslim rhetoric in 2019 and called for a new Reconquista or reconquest of Spain.

He has also expressed disappointment towards Morocco and how it handles the border by allowing illegal immigrants to cross. This has led to conversations about the status of Spanish Sahara. Abascal has expressed a different way to handle it (unlike the other parties that favor abandoning it to Morocco); that the people of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic have the right to self determination, with the hopeful outcome of choosing to remain and integrate as the Spanish Sahara.

Abascal promotes climate change denial and believes that global warming is the "greatest swindle in history". He is opposed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals referred to as Agenda 2030.

On economic issues, he claims the legacy of 1996–2004 Prime Minister José Maria Aznar of the People's Party, and supports an economic liberal and fiscal conservative line, including a sharp reduction in public spending.

Abascal criticized Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez's unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, saying that it amounts to legitimising the "satanic terrorism" of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group responsible for the October 7 attacks. Months before, the Spanish prosecutor’s office had opened an investigation following Abascal's suggestion during an interview with the Argentine newspaper Clarín that a time might come when people would want to “hang [Sánchez] by the feet.”

Personal life
He first married Ana Belén Sánchez, who was herself a PP candidate in local elections in Llodio and Zuia; they had two children. They subsequently divorced. In June 2018, he married the Spanish blogger and influencer Lidia Bedman. He had two children with Bedman. Abascal is a longtime member of the Spanish Ornithological Society. Abascal is an affiliate of the ultraconservative association HazteOir (HO) and was the recipient of a HO Award in 2012.

Due to recurrent death threats for his political views and work, Abascal is licensed to carry and use a handgun for self-defence. Namely, the license type B, granted to civilians proved to experience a real and high risk of being attacked. Under strict Spanish gun laws, such licenses are rare, as only about 0.02% of the population own them.