‘We’ve got them dancing, lads’: Culture wars and self-promotion on Vito Quiles’s España Combativa tour

Abstract

This study examines the España Combativa tour organised by the reactionary activist Vito Quiles at several Spanish universities between October and November 2025. Specifically, it analyses Quiles as a key political influencer within the digital media ecosystem of the Spanish right, given his capacity to generate controversy and antagonism on social media through culture wars. The method used in the research was Grounded Theory, a qualitative approach applied to a study corpus composed of content published across all of Quiles’s social media profiles, podcasts featuring interviews with Quiles, and other content published on social media and in digital news media. The tour is characterised in this paper as a series of pseudo-events operating on two levels: (a) as a self-promotional strategy by Quiles in his capacity as a political agitator and reference point among right-wing youth, generating value for his personal brand before aligned political parties, think tanks and lobbies; and (b) as a propagandistic tactic of public conflict performance centred on exacerbating the perception of antagonism between blocs and producing political polarisation, as it enables the construction of an epic narrative of conflict between ‘decent people’ and the enemies of Spain (Sánchez, the coalition government, the left, and public universities) on social media. The paper advances knowledge on the digital pseudo-event and its use by political influencers for self-promotional and propagandistic purposes.