Santiago Abascal

Santiago Abascal Conde (Spanish: [sanˈtjaɣo aβasˈkal ˈkonde]; born 14 April 1976) is a Spanish politician and since September 2014 the leader of the far-right political party Vox. Abascal is a member of the Congress of Deputies representing Madrid since 2019. Since November 2024 he is also the president of the European right-wing political party Patriots.eu.
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 Defence of the Spanish Nation (Spanish: 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.
Abascal was born in Bilbao but grew up 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 obliged to be 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.
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, regional president of the Community of Madrid, hired him as director of the Community of Madrid Data Protection Agency, where he served from February 2010 to December 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 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, characterised 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.
Abascal's political programme for 2018 included 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 of Spain. Vox increased its share of the vote from 0.2% to 10% in the general election of 2019.
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 favour 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 says if Spain is to have immigration, it needs to be legal and to favour countries from Latin America which already speak Spanish, and share common values. He calls for quotas of immigrants. He has stated that an immigrant from Latin America is not the same as an immigrant from a Muslim country.
Abascal believes that global warming is the "greatest scam in history". He is opposed to Agenda 2030.
Abascal criticised 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 7 October attacks. He further criticised Sánchez for knowing "nothing of Israel's history". 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".
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 with whom he had two children. 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 licence 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.