The Spanish populist party VOX has stated that its regional vice-president María Estévez was violently assaulted in the town of Estella on Sunday by a group of masked extremists.
The alleged assault is said to have taken place in the Plaza de Los Fueros in the centre of the town at around 12:30 in the afternoon when a group of masked individuals approached a VOX information tent that had been set up earlier that day.
According to VOX, the group of masked extremists began hurling insults at the member of the party manning the information tent and began threatening the member of the regional branch of the party, stating one of the attackers hit Ms Estévez, “using one of the legs of the tent,” El Mundo reports.
The populist party claimed Ms Estévez “fell to the ground as a result of the aggression and is waiting to be subjected to a medical examination to check her state of health,” and stated that the attackers also stole money VOX had collected as political donations.
The attack is just the latest against a member of VOX, who are often subjected to violence from political extremists.
In August of 2020, VOX MP Iván Espinosa spoke to Breitbart London on the issue of violence toward members of his party, claiming the Spanish mainstream media often glossed over or failed to report on assaults.
Espinosa claimed that as of August of 2020, over one hundred party members had been subjected to death threats, 93 had made complaints of abuse and aggression, and there were 42 physical attacks on VOX party offices across the country.
“We had people throwing stones at us. One of our members of congress, a young lady, was hit in the head by a stone. She was bleeding quite extensively,” he said, commenting on an attack at a rally that took place earlier that year.
A year later in April of 2021, the leader of VOX, MP Santiago Abascal, was also attacked during a rally in Madrid as far-left extremists threw rocks at him while he was on stage giving a speech prior to the Madrid regional elections.
Despite the violence against their party, VOX has seen a meteoric rise in recent years, going from polling at less than one per cent in the 2016 national election to vying for being the second-largest political force in Spain, with a new poll putting VOX just three per cent away from the ruling Socialist Workers Party.
Earlier this month, VOX also made their first-ever deal to become part of a ruling coalition in Spain, as the party looks to enter the Castile and León government alongside the centre-right People’s Party.
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