Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been to Ceuta five times since late July. Once Spain's snap election was called, he made the enclave the first stop of his campaign and spelled out the promise: "Ceuta will be my first folder on the table of the Council of Ministers." The only wall the government has to defend, his party said, "is its border", and if Morocco "does not comply with its obligations, we have to act and respond." 1 He has pledged to use Article 8 of the constitution, which gives the Armed Forces the defence of Spain's territorial integrity. 2
The crisis he is running on is real. Starting on 30 July, an estimated 80,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, and at least 141 died trying. 3 4 But Ceuta is not what blew up Spanish politics this autumn. What did was the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, 87, from the Madrid flat she had lived in for seventy years. She died after being put out. Behind her were the rents, the evictions and the investment funds. 5 6 Pedro Sánchez answered with two emergency housing decrees. On 2 October the PP, Vox and Junts voted them down, and three days later he called an election for 29 November, Spain's fifth in ten years, with housing as its central issue. 7 Within a week the campaign had swung back to Ceuta, to invasion, to Moroccan treachery. 8 9 The problem is housing. The campaign is immigration. That swap is not a confusion. It is the business model.
The recipe is not Spanish
It would be easy to file this under Spain's own dysfunctions: a border enclave, a colonial hangover, a young democracy's unfinished arguments. But nothing on the Spanish ballot is Spanish. It is the most successful political product in Europe, sold everywhere in local packaging, and Spain is simply where it goes on sale this month.
In Germany the AfD stands at 28.6% in the weighted polling average, 10 and one recent poll put it at 30%, twelve points ahead of the chancellor's CDU/CSU. 11 The domestic intelligence service watches it as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation. The service tried to classify it as a confirmed one, and a court has stopped that for now. 12 Its pitch is the fatherland restored: borders closed, the Germany of before. In France the Rassemblement National has sold the same thing in its own dialect for half a century: national priority, national grandeur, the France of before. Jordan Bardella has polled between 32% and 37% for the first round of 2027. 13 An appeal court in July upheld Marine Le Pen's conviction but left her free to run as well. 14 The FPÖ came first in Austria's 2024 election on a programme titled Festung der Freiheit, "Fortress of Freedom". 15 Law and Justice governed Poland for eight years on the story of a nation betrayed and redeemed. 16 Viktor Orbán ran Hungary for sixteen. 17 From Rome to Washington, cousins of these parties run variants of the same pitch.
The language differs. The product does not. It is nationhood claimed and conservative values invoked, and at the centre of both stands a people. That people is nebulous. Anybody and nobody belongs to it, it is defined by what it is not, and it is promised a home it can only be shown in pictures. Vox says its plan for remigración is born "not of hatred for those outside, but of love for those inside". 18 The inside is never mapped, because it doesn't need to be. It is whoever has not yet been named as outside. This month that is the migrant on the breakwater, and next month it will be someone else.
Every one of these parties sells the same impossible thing. It is not a policy programme, because the programmes contradict each other on arrival. It is a version of the world as it never was. That is the real subject here. Spain is where the product is being weighed this month. The verdict on it, though, was already written once, over the century between 1850 and 1950, and it was damning.
This is not conservatism. It is regressivism
Call the phenomenon by its real name. Conservatism, if the word meant anything, would conserve something: institutions, settlements, the achievable present. What this politics sells is the opposite, the restoration of a past that was never there. Corey Robin made the case in The Reactionary Mind. Conservatism from Burke onward, he argued, is not the preservation of tradition but "a mode of counterrevolutionary practice", the defence of hierarchy against movements from below. And the old order it defends is not the one that existed. Burke and de Maistre themselves attacked the actual old order as decadent and in need of being recreated. 19 The past is manufactured first and then promised back.
That manufacture has a documented history, and this politics never mentions it. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities opened with a definition that scandalised everyone who preferred their nation unexamined: the nation is "an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". 20 It is imagined because no member of even the smallest nation will ever meet most of the others, yet each carries the image of their communion. Anderson was not saying nations are fake. The imagining is real and powerful, and it has shaped modern history. His point was that the object being offered back to voters is, by construction, a picture, and pictures can be redrawn.
Eric Hobsbawm supplied the workshop where the redrawing happens. The Invention of Tradition is an inventory of practices that claim the authority of remotest antiquity while being "quite recent in origin and sometimes invented": Scottish clan tartans, imperial ceremonial, the anthem-flag-and-parade repertoire that taught Europeans to feel their nations as eternal. 21 Much of that stock, Hobsbawm showed, was mass-produced between 1870 and 1914. 22 The modern nation, he wrote, claims to be "the opposite of novel, namely rooted in remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed". 23 That claim is the product, and the truth is the reverse. Svetlana Boym named the emotion it sells: restorative nostalgia, which "does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition". 24
Put together, these amount to one finding. The nation was assembled, and recently. The "conservative values" attached to it were assembled along with it. And the customer is sold both as what has always been.
The recipes, and the century that tested them
The assembly was neither peaceful nor cheap. Between 1850 and 1950 the European powers ran, at scale, the very recipes now being sold again. No historian who has read the record remembers that century as a golden age.
The first recipe was the nation itself, defined ethnically and policed accordingly. The long nineteenth century made the homogeneous people a political fact, with blood, soil and language as its materials and the school and the barracks as its tools. Then it spent decades discovering that the map and the people did not match. Every mismatch produced a category of human beings who were a problem: minorities to be assimilated, resettled, expelled, or worse. Around 1900 Karl Lueger's Christian Socials showed how to run a great European capital on that logic, with antisemitism as a vote-winner. Hitler, who lived in Vienna in those years, later paid him an enthusiastic tribute in Mein Kampf. 25 The logic did not stay at the ballot box. It ran through the expulsions and population exchanges after the First World War to the ghettos and death camps of the Second.
The second recipe was the conservative order invoked to keep the people safe from change: throne, altar, the patriarchal family, hierarchy as nature. It too was manufactured in the same period, and the invented traditions were part of it. It too kept failing in the same direction. The order was defended against the society that actually existed until that society broke it, twice. The cost was two wars that between them destroyed the civilisation the order claimed to conserve.
The third recipe was economic. Bismarck's tariff of 1879 sealed the "marriage of iron and rye", an alliance of industrialists and the Junker landowners that shielded both from foreign competition. 26 Autarky came next. Mussolini launched his Battle for Grain in 1925 to make Italy self-sufficient in wheat. 27 Göring's Four Year Plan of 1936 aimed at German self-sufficiency and readiness for war by 1940. 28 In the United States, Smoot-Hawley pushed the average tariff on dutiable imports to 59% by 1932. US imports fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1933, and world trade fell by about as much. 29 Protectionism, autarky and scapegoating were tried across fifty years, and they delivered two world wars, a depression, and the moral ruin of a continent.
That record is where the product being sold in 2026 comes from, as a matter of history and not of rhetoric. The parties selling nationhood and conservative values are not proposing experiments. They are re-running the most thoroughly tested and failed recipes Europe has. Their sales method never changes either: file the failure as never-tried, and dress the recipe as a return. Nobody is defending the 1930s. They are re-running the 1880s. The mild tier is welfare chauvinism, tariffs by paperwork and deportation by regulation, and it is marketed precisely because its escalation is delayed and deniable. That mild tier no longer belongs to the far right alone. On 1 October the EU's Return Regulation became law, creating a legal basis for "return hubs" outside the Union and for detention beyond 24 months in security cases. The governments behind it present the regulation as an administrative fix — faster and more orderly procedures, with voluntary departure encouraged first and detention reserved for exceptional cases — and nothing here disputes that stated purpose; the point is only that tools of this kind, in the century examined below, have repeatedly served ends beyond the ones announced. The European Parliament had passed it by 418 votes to 218. 30 The century's verdict went missing in the gap between the mild recipe and its radicalisation.
The nostalgia is the product
Once you see the product, the campaigns become legible. The AfD's Germany of before, the RN's France of before, Vox's Spain of before and Brexit's "take back control" all sell the same merchandise, and it is not goods. Restorative nostalgia is the only product with this margin. It cannot be delivered, so it is very hard to catch out. A promise of restored national greatness is the perfect commodity because it cannot be falsified. When delivery fails, the failure goes back into the pitch as proof of sabotage by the elites, Brussels, the media, or the invaders themselves.
Hungary shows how long that can last. Sixteen years of national restoration delivered inflation of 17.1% in 2023, the highest in the EU, and a 76th place in Transparency International's corruption index. 31 They also delivered a fourth consecutive two-thirds majority in 2022. It took until April 2026 for voters to hand a two-thirds majority to someone else. 32 The bill does arrive. It just arrives late.
The deflection works the same way everywhere, and Spain simply runs the cleanest measurable version. Polling compiled by El País this autumn found investment funds blamed as a main cause of the housing crisis by 87% of Sumar voters and 76% of PSOE voters, and also by 59% of PP voters and 50% of Vox voters. On a blame scale, large foreign investors scored 6.4 points and immigration 4.5. 33 The right's own electorate blames capital more than migrants for the problem the right campaigns on, because the campaign is not about the problem. Germany shows the same pattern. The AfD's strongest ground is the east, where it took 44% in Saxony-Anhalt in September. 34 Foreigners there are a single-digit share of the population, far below Berlin, Hamburg or Bremen. 35 The measurable problem is always somewhere the product cannot reach. The campaign is always somewhere it can.
The underlying demand is the same everywhere, and it is real. Arlie Russell Hochschild calls it the deep story. People who feel they have waited in line for a promised life while others are waved past them do not buy income statistics. They buy back their place in the queue. 36 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart describe a cultural backlash: the anger of groups who feel their values and standing slipping from the centre of their own society, whatever their bank balance. 37 Agnieszka Golec de Zavala's work on collective narcissism closes the loop on failure. A group carrying a frustrated sense of entitlement demands recognition and retaliates against offences that are real or imagined. In her studies, people high in collective narcissism "openly rejoiced in the misfortunes of the 'offender'". 38 Punishing the outgroup pays out immediately, in feeling. The material costs arrive about fifteen years later. Across 51 populist presidents and prime ministers since 1900, Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch find GDP per capita about 10% below a non-populist counterfactual after fifteen years, 39 and nobody votes on year fifteen. The receipts are piling up where we can read them. The UK's Office for Budget Responsibility expects Brexit to cost around 4% of GDP in the long run, and Bloomberg Economics puts the drag at £100–200 billion a year and growing. 40 Not one of those numbers was what the customers were buying.
Spain is where the product is on trial this month
Which brings the argument back to the ballot. Spain is this month's cleanest example of the pattern, and its polling is unusually honest about the swap. Immigration is the issue that worries the right most, and housing is the one that worries the left most. 41 This is happening in an economy that has grown faster than most of Europe's large economies. 42 Spain's foreign-born population passed ten million in January, 20.3% of residents. 43 The three largest countries of birth are Morocco, Colombia and Venezuela. Almost half of the foreign-born come from Latin America, a quarter from elsewhere in Europe, and about one in six from Africa. 44 The campaign's imagery of an "invasion" of military-age men comes from a single event of 80,000 people, most of whom were back in Morocco within days, 45 set against a foreign-born population of ten million.
The crime panic can be checked against the record. An analysis of 5.6 million Spanish court sentences from 2007 to 2023 found that the immigrant crime gap shrinks by 48% once age and sex are taken into account. Between 2017 and 2023 the irregular population rose 345% while the standardised foreign crime rate fell 2%. 46 A peer-reviewed study of Chile's migration wave documents the mechanism this fear runs on. Immigration raised people's fear of crime, and their spending on alarms and private security, but had no effect on actual crime. 47
What is being sold against that demand is the old product in Spanish packaging. Vox campaigns on remigración, which it spelled out at its campaign launch in Estepona on 11 October: immediate repatriation of irregular arrivals, deportation of foreign criminals, and the expulsion of foreigners who live on benefits. 48 In Ceuta in August its spokesperson was blunter: "the moment of mass deportations will come". 49 In 2020 Feijóo's PP dismissed Vox as a politics of "fear, anger, resentment and revenge". Since then it has accepted Vox's "national priority", Spanish-born first in the queue for housing and services, as the price of regional coalitions. 50 It now co-governs four regions with Vox. 51 "National priority" is the RN's priorité nationale under another name. The French slogan has a pedigree of its own: as a franceinfo fact-check recounts, national preference was tried in France before, including under Vichy. 52
Then there are the grandchildren. On 10 September, at the request of Vox and the association Iustitia Europa, the Supreme Court provisionally suspended the vote of Spaniards naturalised under the Grandchildren's Law. They number about 163,000 people, descendants of Spanish emigrants and mostly Latin American. Both the public prosecutor and the State Solicitor asked for the suspension to be lifted. On 12 October the court kept it, so they will not vote on 29 November. 53 54 That law is the state's recognition that Spain was once a country people emigrated from, and that their grandchildren are Spaniards. The moment those grandchildren arrive to claim it, their vote becomes suspect. A movement that cannot tolerate its own diaspora coming home is not conserving a national community. It is policing one that never existed in the form it advertises.
Spain votes on 29 November with the right bloc at around half the vote. In the El País/SER 40dB barometer, PP and Vox together have topped 50% for the second month running, which they had never managed before. 55 If Vox joins the next government, it will be the first far-right party to govern Spain since the return of democracy after Franco. 56 And the actual problem, the one that put Maricarmen's name on a movement? The CIS finds that just 13.2% of Spaniards expect access to housing to get better. 57 The regression sells because it answers something real with something counterfeit: belonging instead of a lease, a wall instead of a wage, a glorious past instead of a survivable present.
The arithmetic of the future against the fiction of the past
The past being sold was never real, not in Madrid, not in Berlin, not in Paris, not anywhere. That is not an opinion. It is what everyone who has studied how nations were made has found: imagined communities, invented traditions, restorative nostalgia, all assembled within living memory and then declared eternal. What was real, in the century when these recipes were last tried at scale, was the bill: the minorities and the expulsions, the walls and the wars, the ruins of 1945. That bill is the history of the product now on sale across Europe. The parties selling it never mention that history, because their whole offer depends on the fiction that it was never tried.
The future, meanwhile, keeps its own books. Eurostat's latest baseline projections give the EU 64.9 million fewer people of working age by 2100. In the countries projected to grow, net migration is the only thing doing the growing, and Spain is one of them, rising from 49.1 to 49.8 million while Germany and France shrink. 58 "In Spain there is absolutely no room for anyone else," Vox's Isabel Pérez Moñino declared in Ceuta. 59 On Eurostat's numbers, the country she speaks for only keeps its size because of the people she wants gone.
That leaves two dates on the same curve. On 29 November, Spain answers whether the product still sells in the country that remembers Franco best. In December, Saxony-Anhalt's state parliament votes on whether Ulrich Siegmund becomes the first AfD minister-president in German history, and the first far-right head of a German state government since the Nazi era. The AfD holds 39 of 83 seats. That is three short of a majority, but a third ballot needs only a plurality of votes cast, and the CDU is debating whether to walk out of the chamber. 60 61 Whatever the posters say in either country, the country on offer in both is one that never existed. The country that actually exists is older, smaller and more mixed than the picture, and it is held together, if at all, by the very people whose expulsion is the centrepiece of the offer. That is the choice on every ballot this winter, and it is the same ballot everywhere.