‘For Spain!’: Constructing the Spanish People in Vox’s Social Media Videos

Abstract

This article analyses how the Spanish radical right-wing party Vox constructs the figure of the people in the videos disseminated through its social media platforms. The study focuses on audiovisual content published on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Tik-Tok during the electoral periods between 2014 and 2025. Drawing on a semiotic perspective, the article aims to identify the distinct discursive configurations through which Vox presents the collectivity and positions itself as its legitimate spokesperson. To this end, it applies the model of the collective actant developed by Algirdas J. Greimas and Éric Landowski, together with the notion of the collective political actant formulated by Jacques Fontanille. This theoretical framework facilitates the reconstruction of the discursive strategy through which Vox endeavours to resolve a constitutive paradox of populism: the tension between Vox’s claim to embody the people as a whole and its electoral support, which is limited to a portion of the population. The analysis reveals that Vox’s videos articulate a logic of inclusion and exclusion, in which the community addressed by the party is defined as the only one truly adhering to national values and capable of acting in a manner worthy of the fatherland. In contrast, political opponents are excluded from the community of the Spanish people and presented as hostile to it. In this way, Vox is discursively configured as the legitimate embodiment of the people, while simultaneously delineating its identity boundaries.