A young Vox deputy is walking around, with a Fred Perry earring and polo shirt, breaking ideological schemes left and right.
The rise of Carlos Hernández Querorecently promoted to deputy speaker in Congress, replacing Javier Ortega Smithrepresents a gain if only for the removal of the brotherhood of the teba and the hussar mustache.
To broaden its social base in harmony with the rest of the Western sovereigntist forcesit was a matter of time before Vox moved from the Salamanca neighborhood to the red belt. And it didn’t help that all their troops looked like atrabiliary ex-policemen dressed as if for a hunt.
Vox was missing a normal guy from Tetuán who frequented Casa Paco more than the Nautical Club.
And they hit the nail on the head: a historian of heteroclite bibliography and seasoned in neighborhood activism, who worked overtime at the end of the Plenary Session to serve us friends from the reactionary gathering in the extinct Casamata tavern a few beers, while Espinosa de los Monteros was given (in expression of Pedro Lecanda) al fundraising in the morning between plutocracy.
But the voxera change that Quero personifies It is not only aesthetic and generational, but also discursive.
The deputy stood up a few days ago in Aluche to denounce that the “Madrid of all the accents” of Ayuso It privileges the lustrous foreign millionaire over the disinherited Iberian currito.
And the populist alert was raised in the barracks of the liberal Moral Police, unfailing in its task of guarding the deposit of faith in the Invisible Hand. Quero’s speech sounds red to them. It smells like a podemita.
The select minority of liberals with denomination of origin pride themselves on a sagacity to detect and repudiate interventionist kinships, but in doing so they only display a devastating analytical vulgarity. Because Quero’s speech is not, according to his caricature, that of a “left with a crucifix”, but that of a consistent conservatism. It is not the new “protectionist” right, but the lifelong right.
The postwar consensus relegated “rootedness thinking” to discredit (Chantal Delsol), and naturalized the conjunctural and late alloy of conservatism with liberalism as an unshakable reality. Hence, those who claimed to have buried all the strong gods become exasperated when there is now an ebb of the national preference doctrine.
But this myopic political vision forgets that conservatism comes from a secular social, mutualist and corporatist framework, which in Spain can be traced back to the social right of Maura y GivenCatholic unionism inspired by the Social Doctrine of the Church, or Falangism of José Antonio Primo de Rivera“relentlessly anti-capitalist and anti-communist” alike.
A José Antonio who, regarding Quero’s fetish theme, housing, lamented that “while liberalism wrote wonderful declarations of rights on paper, in the best capitals of Europe, human beings, our brothers, were crammed into infamous houses, and receiving the sarcasm of being told that they were free and sovereign.”
Quero’s speech, despite what the progressive exorcists and neocon fundamentalists claim, is not Falangist.
But its spirit, shared with traditional conservatism, is similar: a criticism of economic liberalism that proletarianizes the masses and corners small family property and small businesses. A perspective from the coordinates of social justice and the common good that denounces the grip between big capital and the confiscatory Administration against the middle classes. And that postulates that Only with an economic order ensured by a strong State can the real exercise of individual freedom be guaranteed.
This scheme of a social but not socialist right, of a communitarian but not collectivist conservatism, of an idea of politics that is neither that of the social democratic client state nor that of the minimal libertarian state, entails a great virtue: it allows us to broaden the horizons of the political imagination and provide ourselves with a holistic view of political problems, which the liberal right and the left lack.
A look that allows us to notice that both vulture fund speculation and mass immigration affect the housing shortage.
Antonio Maestre has applauded the new VOX spokesperson.
And that says it all.
VOX says that the PP and the PSOE are the same.
But the PP has never been applauded by Maestre, nor by the left media, nor by those who live off the system. https://t.co/2JEokZhaRd
— David Diago (@daviddiagoc) November 6, 2025
That the housing problem is explained not only by excess regulation, construction deficit and squatting, but also by tourist apartments and tax benefits for foreign investors.
That the popular classes are gripped both by the Treasury’s collecting voracity and by unbridled free trade.
That neighborhood identity is no less threatened by the proliferation of Peruvian restaurants than by the replacement of taverns by Starbucks.
In a comprehensive article he wrote for the book Being conservative is the new punkHernández Quero strived to demonstrate that the associative culture and belonging to the territory (in the face of the abstract bureaucratism of the State and the relocation of the anonymous globalized world) is idiosyncratic of the conservative ideology. The conservatives had always preached a discourse of subsidiarity and solidarity that puts social groups before individuals.
A working-class right is beginning to take shape, vindicating organic neighborhood in the face of cosmopolitan wandering, which relocates the discursive accent from the sphere of freedom to that of stability. And that is when the money right denounces her with the insult of the “woke right”, because of her alleged emulation of the identity, anti-modern and populist tics of the new left.
counted Carlos Arniches that when an Andalusian aristocrat was showing his sumptuous farmhouse to Don Antonio Maura, and he noticed the only miserable room, the potentate interjected: “And this is where the farmhands sleep.” To which the illustrious conservative replied: “Well, be careful when they wake you up!”
The aforementioned anecdote therefore offers another vision of the nascent woke right: a conservatism that has resolved to emerge from its lethargy in the face of the dispossession of the humble to prevent the revolutionaries from waking them up.