The SALF movement was the surprise of the European elections in Spain. Barely noticed before the election, it scored points with voters with populist slogans. Can it change Spain’s political landscape?
This party on the evening of the European elections goes on for a long time. Alvise Pérez is being celebrated in the Madrid club scene. Many of his followers want to see him live, because his new movement is getting 4.58 percent from a standing start and can send three representatives to the European Parliament.
His supporters are called “squirrels,” in reference to the logo of “Se acabó la fiesta” (SALF – in English: The party is over). In a club, Pérez’s team hands out hats and shirts with his trademark: a squirrel wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, which is now used by very different movements to give themselves a rebellious stamp.
What Pérez’s rebellion will look like is not stated in any program. But to the cheers of his voters, he announces which party should be over: “Spain has become a party for criminals, corrupt people, pedophiles and rapists.”
A rant against the “Party rule”
Pérez rails against “party rule,” especially against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whom he wants to put in prison. He also rants against immigration, feminism and the media.
How SALF stands on Europe remains unclear. Pérez and his two colleagues would forego their MPs’ allowances, the smart, combative 34-year-old announced: “We are not parasites.”
As the SALF party comes to an end that night, Spain’s newspapers are already full of questions about the phenomenon of his movement. First of all, they want to know who this influencer is who campaigned with a van, a megaphone and, above all, a lot of know-how in social media.
Just an “academic illiterate”?
His full name is actually Luis Pérez Fernández, but he changed his name to Alvise. He is “academic illiteracy,” Pérez says about himself in one of the interviews that a YouTuber and rapper with a good reach regularly conducts with him, chatting casually in the YouTuber’s car.
Pérez initially worked as a political consultant and was active in the liberal-conservative party spectrum; there were also apparently points of contact with the Spanish right-wing populists of Vox.
Guillermo Fernández Vázquez of the Carlos III University in Madrid ranks Pérez’s movement against the ARD Studio Madrid a “mixture of conspiracy and right-wing extremist ideas”.
Hoaxes as the key to success?
For the scientist, the key to SALF’s success lies in hoaxes, i.e. in seemingly jokey false reports on social networks. This allows Pérez to reach people “who have not previously been infected by right-wing, right-wing extremist, radical or extreme ideas”.
The fact that Pérez has been investigated several times for such allegations apparently does not bother his “squirrels”. The SALF voters are quite young, between 18 and 45 years old, many of them young men, says Fernández.
Anyone who wants to know more about “Se acabó la fiesta” will find only five short headlines on the homepage about the group’s alleged revelations and links to two social media platforms. Alvise didn’t need more than that to mobilize more than 800,000 voters.
Strengthening or weakening of the right-wing camp?
Compared to other European countries, Spain voted relatively moderately. 64 percent of Spanish voters voted for the two popular parties, slightly more for the conservative Partido Popular than for the Socialists, who are governing in a left-wing coalition and are comparable to the SPD in Germany.
The Spanish ultra-right Vox gained 9.6 percent compared to the 2019 European elections, but lost compared to the most recent Spanish parliamentary election a year ago – probably also to SALF. And so the small group, which has so far only run for Europe, certainly has what it takes to strengthen the right-wing spectrum in Spain as well.
This is all the more true after Pérez’s latest announcement in an interview with the newspaper El Pais: “I want to save my homeland and that is Spain.” The way there leads via Moncloa, the Spanish seat of government.
This means that before the next Spanish parliamentary election, Pérez wants to turn his group into a party. Only then could “The party is over” appear on the ballot paper.
Political scientist Fernández believes that this could mean that right-wing groups will take voters away from each other. But: “In the end, Pérez will attract people to this bloc who were not in this bloc before.”
In the short term, he could have a negative effect on the right, but in the long term it could be more strengthening, says Fernández. But for now, the Spanish parliament will remain as it is. There are no elections coming up. And for Pérez, the party is in Brussels for now anyway.