SUE REID: Rise of Europe's new far Right: From Spain to Greece, an army of ... trends now
The young man swaggered along a side street in the Spanish capital. He was sporting tattoos, a thin moustache and wearing a T-shirt with the logo: 'The White Race. Save European Identity.'
He hailed from Valladolid, a provincial city still notorious as a sanctuary for fascists in their fight against the communists during the country's bitter civil war in the 1930s.
The 23-year-old had travelled to Madrid a few days ago to demonstrate over uncontrolled immigration to Spain which he says is destroying both the country's identity and its Christian roots.
Alongside him were hundreds more Spanish youngsters, dressed in black regalia, all of whom thought exactly the same way as him.
'It's not racist to protect my own people from extinction,' said the young man in the T-shirt, who refused to give his name but agreed to a photo, as he joined a noisy rally of the far-Right nationalist movement, Nucleo Nacional, which is growing in popularity among those in their late teens and twenties.
An papier-mache life-sized effigy of Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez is attacked with sticks at a protest in Madrid
A young man in a 'White Race' T-shirt at a Nucleo National rally in the Spanish capital
Protesters with pre-constitutional Spanish flags, associated with the dictator Franco, in Madrid
Just minutes before the rally at a rented hall in the north of the city, there were scuffles when a Left-wing gang appeared from nowhere to rough up those who were queuing to get in.
An 18-year-old was dragged down and given a bloody head wound before the gang fled round the corner as fast as they had arrived.
Inside the event, a muscle-honed man wearing a black mask declared from a stage: 'We must maintain our culture, traditions and customs implanted here by Christianity.
'Please come and volunteer with us. There are those who call us Nazis in disguise. They are wrong.'
His invitation was met with loud cheers from the mostly young, male audience. The same enthusiastic reaction greeted another Nucleo Nacional speaker who told the crowd: 'The control of our nation is in the hands of traitors, barbarians, and degenerates who promote transgenderism, the loss of Spanish jobs and opportunities for our young people.
'This has led to a disorder unimaginable for most in our society. We are at the beginning of a fight for a victory that will await us. Viva Espana!'
The rally's venue was hired from an extreme nationalist group, Falange, which was selling its own brand of regalia there. It has no parliamentary seats but exists in the shadows and has an infamous past.
It was a band of 250 Falangists in Valladolid who helped notorious Spanish dictator General Franco win the bloody, long-drawn-out civil war for the nationalists, giving him absolute rule over Spain until his death in 1975 finally paved the way, three years later, for a liberal democracy.
A masked member of the far-Right nationalist movement, Nucleo Nacional, which is growing in popularity across Spain among those in their late teens and twenties
For decades after that, the far-Right in Spain never dared show its face in public. But that changed in 2019 when the fiercely anti-immigration Vox party won its first foothold in the Cortes, Spain's parliament.
Vox's fortunes have since soared. It now holds nearly a third of the seats in the Cortes after promising a populist agenda of tighter borders, stricter law and order, and the deportation of illegal migrants coming to Spain across the sea from North Africa.
An extraordinary 27 per cent of those under the age of 35 voted for the party in a national poll a year ago. And it's predicted that in other EU nations huge numbers of the young will follow their lead by shifting to the Right in elections for the European Parliament this June.
The fact is that, here in Spain, where one in three people under 25 are jobless and immigration is soaring, trust in mainstream politics has taken a hammering.
The T-shirted youth at the Sunday rally said he plans to cast a vote (yes, for Vox) in the forthcoming polls. But many young Spaniards have lost faith in the ballot box entirely.
They are instead staging media-grabbing protests all over the country in support of a far-Right credo of nationalism and populism.
The poster boy of this rebellion is a well-educated political science student in his twenties called Cesar Pintado.
Like the youth in the T-shirt, he comes from Valladolid with its unsavoury fascist past.
Pintado is linked to a rebel movement called Revolt which is fiercely critical of Spain's Left-wing leaders, and their woke-leaning liberal agenda. Since January, which was soon after Revolt first emerged as an entity via TikTok and other social media, the movement has staged noisy rallies of the young in 11 cities across the country — in every one denouncing the ruling Socialists and prime minister Pedro Sanchez.
Hundreds of Revolt supporters turned up on New Year's Eve at Sanchez's headquarters in Madrid waving Spanish national flags.
Provocatively, they threw around sex toys and Catholic rosaries to get attention from the Press. Out came a papier-mache life-size figure of the premier which they then beat with sticks — an act which his Leftist party denounced, predictably, as a hate crime.
Revolt has already gained 30,000 followers on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, with its messages online calling for 'pressure on the streets against a traitor government' intent on destroying Spain.
'We are gathering in a great patriotic wave to unify Spain. We embrace our Spanish identity. We reject wokeism as a movement defined by anti-racism, feminism, and in favour of LGBTQ rights, and Marxist global forces,' goes the Revolt propaganda
