Vox party’s hardline attitudes appear to have turned off Spanish voters

Party has been relegated to near-irrelevance as Spain bucks European trend of shift towards far right

About 10 months ago, a smiling Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, proudly described the northern region of Castilla y Leon as a model of what lay ahead for the party.

The sparsely populated region, where the far right had made its first foray into a Spanish regional government since the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, was a showroom" for the party's promises to do away with Spanish laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality and violence against women.