With her full-arm tattoos, glistening tooth gems and patriotic embrace of the national flag, Angie Corine, a ginger-haired rapper, is the new face of Spain’s insurgent populist right.
At its vanguard is Vox, a party with a chance of forming a governing coalition with the conservative People’s Party (PP) after Pedro Sánchez called a snap election this week — a high-stakes gamble by a prime minister fighting for political survival.
What Corine embodies, with her chirpy brand of Vox-inspired satire, is the public anger directed at the leftwing premier after his eight years in power.
“I don’t want your handouts, your gifts or the dole,” Corine sings in one tune. “I just want a prime minister who’s not a nutjob.”
Not only are more young people warming to the rightwing messages Corine puts to music, but the personal vitriol aimed at the Socialist leader has hit extraordinary new highs — even for a world accustomed to political rancour.
The rapper once called Sánchez a “border collie, a smart mutt” — alluding to an offensive nickname that puns on Pedro and perro (dog). She branded him a “psychopath” for promoting his summer playlist on Instagram while Ceuta, a Spanish African exclave, was reeling from the illegal arrival of more than 70,000 migrants.
Rapper Angie Corine's lyrics reflect the growing popularity of right wing politics among young people in Spain
Bitter divisions are ubiquitous in western democracies, but Spain is a stark example of what academics call “affective” polarisation — a version where rifts are rooted not in policy but in basic emotions of distrust and contempt.
Mariano Torcal, a political science professor at Pompeu Fabra University, blames Vox and the PP for deliberately stoking hostility by insulting and “dehumanising” Sánchez. He said the opposition’s strategy was “mostly based on discrediting the leader and accusing him of terrible things, like saying Spain is a dictatorship” under Sánchez.
This week a pundit on Telemadrid, a conservative television station, described the prime minister as “punchable”. At a birthday party, the FT watched five-year-olds hit a piñata with a stick while a father urged them to “whack it like it’s Pedro Sánchez”.
Emotional polarisation tends to be starker when the enemy is seen as morally bankrupt or a threat to society. For Sánchez’s enemies, he ticks both those boxes.
He has been engulfed by corruption allegations against people close to him, including his wife Begoña Gómez. She denies wrongdoing and Sánchez says he is the victim of politicised judges waging “lawfare”. He is also accused of putting his “cronies” in charge of institutions that were once unpoliticised, such as the Bank of Spain, the state polling agency and telecoms company Telefónica.
William Chislett, an author of books on Spain, said Sánchez has broken his word on points of principle. He said he would never govern with the far left or make parliamentary pacts with Catalan separatists and a Basque party with links to Eta, a disbanded terrorist group. But he ended up doing all those things to keep his minority governments in power. “Even if we know the right lies too, that dishonesty adds fuel to the overall anger,” Chislett said.
Sánchez this week said he had made Spain a “global reference point for peace, feminism and prosperity”. He is also the last EU leader openly welcoming immigrants, who have helped make the country one of the rich world’s fastest-growing economies.
In response, Vox leader Santiago Abascal has accused the premier of “promoting a migrant invasion . . . to replace the Spanish people who don’t like him”.
Vox — a fiercely anti-immigration party founded in 2013 — was at 19 per cent in a 40dB opinion poll published on Friday. The PP, which takes a more moderate stance on immigration, stands at 32 per cent, while Sánchez’s Socialists are on 28 per cent.
Corine, who has more than 1mn followers on YouTube, has sung about schools “with no Spanish kids”. But in a podcast interview she denied being a xenophobe because she was born in the US and identifies as “half-American, half-Polish”. In one song she refers to being “Spanish-ised” during her upbringing in Málaga. The rapper did not respond to an interview request from the FT.
According to one analysis, Sánchez elicits such hatred because he has reopened the wounds of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship. Under a 2022 law backed by the premier, the country created a registry of Franco’s victims, exhumed mass graves and sought to identify the remains of tens of thousands who “disappeared”.
But Luis Garicano, a former centrist Spanish MEP, rejected the idea that Spaniards are divided because of the civil war. “I’m almost 60 and grew up in a hopeful Spain, a country that was coming together. It wasn’t the reds versus the blues. This is a relatively new thing,” he said.
He traced the acrimony back to 2004, when a PP government wrongly blamed Eta for deadly train bombs planted by al-Qaeda. Then came a Socialist administration that mishandled a property bubble and a PP term defined by the Eurozone debt crisis and austerity.
Next was Sánchez, who is no innocent victim, said Garicano, now a public policy professor at LSE. “What Sánchez has wanted from the start is to make Vox the main opposition and to dig a trench between his voters and the right,” he said. “He wants to stop people moving from left to right by saying ‘look, if you go to the right you’re essentially voting for extremists that represent Franco and all that’.”
But he is playing with fire. Sánchez has condemned Abascal for spreading hate. “You’ve called me an autocrat, a dictator,” the premier said in parliament last month. “They even call me a dog.”
Corine is also on the receiving end of insults. “The other day they yelled ‘fucking fascist’ at me on my doorstep,” she said on TikTok. “But I’m the radical one?”
The rapper has recently found God, donned a crucifix, and said she’s softened her hard edges — to some extent. “I wish the best for everyone,” she said in another video, “except Pedro Sánchez.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela