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Who shot the founder of Spain’s far-right Vox party?

Spaniards were shocked by the news on Thursday that Alejo Vidal-Quadras had been shot in the face at point-blank range. The 78-year-old politician, currently in a serious but stable condition, has his suspicions over who's responsible. 

Published: 10 November 2023 11:22 CET
Who shot the founder of Spain's far-right Vox party?
Vidal-Quadras has long been an outspoken opponent of the Iranian regime and is convinced his assassination attempt was carried out by a hitman operating under their orders.(Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP)

At 1.30pm on Thursday November 9th, the ex-head of Spain’s Popular Party in Catalonia and one of the founders of the far-right party Vox was shot in the jaw in Madrid’s upmarket Salamanca neighbourhood by a man whose face was concealed by a helmet and who quickly escaped on a motorbike after the near-fatal shooting. 

READ MORE: Founder of Spain’s far-right Vox shot in the face in Madrid

The attempted murder came just hours after Spain’s Socialists reached a controversial deal with Catalan separatist party Junts per Catalunya over their political amnesty, an agreement which has led to days of right-wing protests across numerous Spanish cities. 

Despite his injury (a double jaw fracture), Vidal-Quadras remained conscious when he was rushed to hospital and was able to inform Spanish police who he believed was behind his shooting. 

Contrary to the initial belief that the assailant’s motives were linked to heightened national political tensions, Vidal-Quadras has pointed to the Iranian regime being the potential culprit. 

“I don’t have any other enemies,” he is quoted in the Spanish press as having told police. 

Vidal-Quadras, who remains in a serious but stable condition in hospital, has long been an outspoken opponent of the Iranian government and is convinced his assassination attempt was carried out by a hitman operating under their orders.

This tallies with the version given by the National Council of the Resistance of Iran (NCRI), with links for many years to Vidal-Quadras and financiers of 80 percent of the first Vox campaign in the 2014 European parliamentary elections.

“For the Iranian resistance it is clear, the main suspect is the religious fascism that’s in power in Iran, which Doctor Vidal-Quadras has dedicated an important part of his life to fighting against,” NCRI head Maryam Rajavi is quoted as saying in Spanish daily El Mundo.

For its part, the Iranian Embassy in Madrid sent out a message on the same day in which at no point it referred to Vidal-Quadras’ attempted assassination or ensuing accusation, instead accusing the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI or MKO) of being a “sect” that’s killed “17,000 innocent victims in acts of terrorism”.

The MKO are an Iranian dissident organisation which is now headquartered in Albania and which has been described as being rooted in Islam with revolutionary Marxism, a claim others deny, calling it instead the first democratic Muslim organisation in contemporary Iran.

Vidal-Quadras features on Iran’s watchlist, among other reasons for his public defence of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which Tehran considers to be the political arm for the MKO.

Spanish police are now investigating whether the right-wing politicians’ claims could be true. 

Vidal-Quadras, who founded Vox in 2013 alongside other politicians and was the head of the centre-right Popular Party in Catalonia from 1991 to 1996, now runs a law firm in the Catalan capital and has numerous dissidents of the Iranian regime as his clients.

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POLITICS

Who will win Catalonia’s regional elections?

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's Socialists hope to seize power in Spain's Catalonia region in elections Sunday, to prove its appeasement strategy has more appeal than the separatist agenda of Carles Puigdemont. The stakes are high for both.

Published: 9 May 2024 13:29 CEST
Who will win Catalonia's regional elections?

This wealthy northeastern region of some eight million people votes Sunday to elect deputies to its 135-seat regional parliament.

Opinion polls suggest Sánchez’s Socialists are well ahead of Puigdemont’s hardline separatist JxCat and its rival ERC, led by current regional leader Pere Aragonès. 

A poll by Spain’s leading daily El País found that a coalition between separatist parties Junts, ERC and CUP would only have a 28 percent chance of reaching the majority; while a coalition by left-wing parties the PSC (PSOE’s Socialist branch), ERC and Comuns has a 78 percent possibility of forming a government. 

Another poll by Spain’s state-run CIS research body also has the PSC as the favourites to win with between 29.8 and 33.2 percent of the vote.

Other commentators haven’t ruled out the possibility of an electoral stalemate with neither block capable of obtaining a majority, which would result in repeat elections in the region of 8 million people. 

Junts’ Puigdemont was Catalan leader at the time of the failed independence bid in October 2017 which sparked Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.

Despite fleeing Spain to avoid prosecution, he has remained active in the region’s politics, leading JxCat from Belgium. He is hoping his imminent return from exile under an amnesty bill soon to become law will boost his chances in the vote.

For Sánchez, seizing back power from the separatists – who have ruled the region for a decade – would be a major victory in his efforts to turn the page on the crisis sparked by the secession bid.

READ ALSO: Why regional elections in Catalonia matter to Spain’s future

It would also allow him to press the restart button on his latest term in office, which began in November.

So far, it has been soured by bitter right-wing opposition and a corruption probe into his wife, which almost prompted his resignation late last month.

Socialist hopes high

A win by the Catalan Socialist party would allow the region “to turn over a new leaf after 10 lost years” said its leader Salvador Illa, 58, who served as Spain’s health minister during the pandemic.

Although the Socialists won the most votes during the last regional election in February 2021, Illa was unable to piece together a governing majority. The separatist parties took power by clubbing together to form a 74-seat coalition.

Since becoming Spanish prime minister in June 2018, Sánchez has sought to defuse the Catalan conflict. He has maintained dialogue with the moderate ERC and pardoned the separatists jailed over their role in the 2017 secession bid.

And late last year, he moved to push through an amnesty bill for those still wanted by the justice system in exchange for the separatists’ parliamentary support for him to secure a new term in office.

Under terms of the bill, Puigdemont – who fled Spain to avoid prosecution after the botched independence bid – will finally be able to return home after more than six years in exile.

It will be put to a final parliamentary vote later this month.

Catalan separatist leader and candidate of Junts per Catalunya Carles Puigdemont (R) raises his fist during a campaign rally in the French southeastern town of Argelès-sur-Mer. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

High stakes for Puigdemont

Puigdemont is for the moment unable to enter Spain, where he is still subject to an arrest warrant.

So he has been campaigning for Sunday’s election from a southern French seaside town near the Spanish border, and polls suggest his support has been rising steadily in recent weeks.

READ MORE: Exiled separatist leader rallies support in France ahead of Catalan election

“The independence movement has stalled a bit (since the botched 2017 separatist bid) but I think Puigdemont’s candidature has generated some enthusiasm,” Arnau Olle, a 29-year-old IT specialist from a town near Barcelona told AFP at a weekend campaign rally in Argeles-sur-Mer.

Puigdemont, who served as Catalan leader from January 2016, wants to have another shot at leading the region if the separatists retain a majority, and if JxCat comes out on top.

But that could be complicated given the divisions within the pro-independence movement and the emergence in recent months of the ultranationalist Catalan Alliance. While polls suggest it could win several seats, no other party wants to enter into a pact with it.

For Puigdemont, Sunday’s vote is also a high-stakes game, not least because he has pledged to retire from politics if he does not win.

Polls suggest the Socialists will win around 40 seats, which would mean it would need allies to reach the 68 required for a governing majority.

One possible alliance would involve the far left and Aragones’s ERC, but that would likely cause an implosion within the independence movement.

Political analyst Ernesto Pascual of the Autonomous University of Barcelona did not see such alliances hurting Sánchez’s left-wing government, whose fragile parliamentary majority depends on support from both JxCat and ERC.

Neither party has an interest in doing anything that might “force Sánchez to resign and trigger new elections”, he said.

That could change the scenario dramatically, he explained, referring to the possibility of a new government of the right which has vowed to rollback any move to amnesty the separatists.

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