It is wise not to take newspaper reports at face value, but if you’re a journalist yourself, believing what you read in your own paper is, I suppose, an occupational hazard. Peter Preston in the Guardian has fallen into that very trap.
On Friday 29 May Giles Tremlett wrote in the Guardian:
Conservatives woo far right ally in Spain
A Spanish political party previously aligned with some of the most extreme rightwing parties in Europe and backed by Blas Piñar, a leading apologist for former dictator Francisco Franco, has allied itself with the British Conservative party.
So, the Guardian’s intention is to link the Conservative Party with the far right. He goes on:
The party defines itself as conservative but, according to its website, backed the so-called Vienna Declaration that brought together extreme rightwing parties from across Europe in 2005. Its allies then were Austria's Freedom party, the French National Front of Jean Marie Le Pen, the Flemish party Vlaams Belang, Alessandra Mussolini's Azione Sociale and extreme rightists from Romania and Bulgaria. Though some of the parties are openly xenophobic or Nazi apologists, Alternativa Española says it is not racist.
All of this is perfectly true, as a look at the Alternativa Española (AES) web site shows, and it is probably what Peter Preston relied on when he wrote today about the British Conservatives sitting with ‘Spanish neo-Francoists’ in the new European Parliament. The problem is that is not going to happen. At last year’s Spanish general election AES managed a grand total, in all of Spain, of 7,078 votes (0.03%)! Their chances of being elected are, quite simply, zero. The Guardian’s original article failed to say this, and Preston, who claims a knowledge of Spanish affairs, didn’t think that the far right is next to non-existent in Spain.
Ironically, any Spanish sympathisers with Francoism are to be found in the conservative Partido Popular, which is a member of the EPP group – the group that the Tories are leaving!
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