VOX and Liberal Democracy: an intellectual genealogy of the national-populist criticism of political parties

Right-wing populist parties distrust political, cultural and scientific elites, all of which are stigmatised as a single, all-encompassing category responsible for the ills that plague Western societies, in particular the dissolution of national essences. This article explores the intellectual genealogy of the critique of political elites made by the Spanish national-populist formation Vox. We will see that its critique of political parties finds an immediate source of inspiration in the politician and former Francoist minister Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora and, ultimately, in Carl Schmitt. Vox's critique of political parties is but the spearhead of its challenge to liberal democracy, and can be extended to the right-wing populist space in Europe.