Raising the dead? EU media and the pariahing of Vox across three Spanish elections

Spain was long viewed as resistant to the radical right. Yet Vox's emergence transformed the country from the so-called ‘Spanish exception' into another European site of debate over radical-right normalisation. Scholarship on media and the radical right has asked how such actors become mainstream rather than how pariah status can endure once their institutional incorporation makes exclusion untenable. Through qualitative content analysis of 170 news stories, this article examines how EU media (Politico Europe, Euronews and Euractiv) covered Vox and Santiago Abascal during the Spanish general elections of April 2019, November 2019 and July 2023. Drawing on literature surrounding the ‘mainstreaming' and ‘pariahing' of the radical right and Hallin's three spheres of news coverage, the analysis finds that Vox continued to be portrayed as democratically suspect despite becoming a viable governing partner. References to Francoism and dictatorship shifted across the three elections from classifying Vox against Spain's authoritarian past to projecting its political future, while cooperation with Vox extended democratic suspicion to the mainstream right. The article argues that electoral success and increased media visibility do not necessarily settle struggles over political legitimacy in the press, and that pariahing operated through the terms of inclusion rather than exclusion from coverage.