This is what Spain’s pivot to the far right means for its citizens and British expats alike

If Theresa May proceeds with immigration bureaucracy to stop Spanish and other EU citizens from living and working in Britain, EU capitals will reciprocate

The result of the Andalusia regional election confirms the trend that 20^th century party politics is dying on its feet in Europe. Monolingual commentators in London get excited about the arrival of yet another extreme right-wing party – Vox, which has come from nowhere in Spain to win 11 per cent of the votes in Andalusia.

Like the AfD in Germany, or Matteo Salvini in Italy, the assumption that countries that have experienced mid-century fascist dictatorships – Germany, Italy, Spain – were inoculated against the extreme right has also been shown to be false in Spain.

Vox, however, is not like AfD, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France or the Lega in Italy. Its main driving force is a nostalgia for authoritarian Catholic centralism associated with the Franco era. Its founders are furious at any idea of talking with Basque or Catalan nationalists and opposed to the liberal reforms of the Spanish socialist government from 2004-2012 on women and gay rights, which the Catholic church mobilised against.

Vox doesn’t like mass immigration but the paradox is that the biggest group of immigrants in Spain is British expats, followed by Romanians as well as many Latin American white Spanish-speaking Catholics who arrived in the boom years of the 1990s to do unskilled low-pay work in construction, agriculture and tourism.

Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE) had ruled absolutely over Andalusia for 36 years. Like the Labour Party in Scotland, it took votes for granted and did not hear the hoof beats of new parties and new politics coming along. PSOE’s leader in Andalusia was an uncharismatic machine politician. She also had to deal with endless reports on petty corruption at town-hall level; Spanish politics is financed by backhanders from business.

The level of corruption cost the previous centre-right Partido Popular prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, his job. But in Andalusia over many years there was despair at the inability of the left to get on top of local corruption.

Vox gained 12 seats in the 109-strong Andalusia parliament as the other arrival in Spanish politics, Ciudadanos (Citizens), moved from 9 to 21 seats. Another winner was the more left-wing “Adelante (Forward) Andalusia” which increased its share of seats from 5 to 17. All these parties are pro-European and Vox is cautious in attacking the EU.

So the idea that the new populism in Europe is the same as the Brexit or Trump vote is not quite right. Some parties share the underlying racism of UKIP and the xenophobic Tories who campaigned for Brexit on the grounds that Britain should stop Europeans from working in the UK. But much more, the continental rightist populism is focused on Islam and refugees who arrived following the UK-French-US destruction of state authority in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Now in Andalusia everyone is scratching their heads trying to work out possible coalitions that can stay in government, but every party hates every other party.

In Austria, the Freedom Party with its roots in a Nazi past, has gone into coalition with the centre-right Christian democrats. Forming a Swedish government appears impossible as neither the main centre-right or centre-left parties want to go into coalition with the Swedish Democrats who also have Nazi origins.

Grand coalitions, however, do not work well – as the crisis in German politics suggests. The old politics that ran Europe between 1950-2000 is dying and there are no midwives for a new politics. The crisis over Brexit has revealed deep fissures in Britain’s Conservative and Labour party systems with Scotland and Northern Ireland preferring nationalist identity politics to a broader UK-wide party system.

Leftwing populism in the form of Syriza, Podemos, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, Sinn Féin and arguably the Momentumised Corbyn Labour Party are as strong as the racist right populists that get all the headlines in the over-simplistic analysis in the British media.

Spain has now become the same as other European countries. What should worry Britain is that if, as seems likely, Theresa May proceeds to set up a giant immigration bureaucracy to stop Spanish and other EU citizens from living and working here, other EU capitals will reciprocate and British expats could face pressure.

The majority of British expats in Spain are not officially registered as they take advantage of EU citizenship to buy flats or small houses or set up bars, cafés, and small business on the basis of the freedom of movement philosophy.

The socialist administration of Andalusia stretching from Gibraltar to the costas, where most British expats in Spain live, has always been friendly both to Britain and its citizens in the region. A new right-wing administration perhaps tinged with open anti-immigrant xenophobia will not make life easier for Brits as London turns the screw against students, baristas, and other workers from the continent, including Spain.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of Europe. He writes on European politics and policy