With more than a million followers on Instagram, Alvise Pérez is dividing the country with his anti-immigration agenda. Alvise Pérez leads not a party but a group called Se Acabó la Fiesta, which translates as The Party’s Over. He left southern Spain more than a decade ago to wash dishes in a restaurant in Leeds, and while he was there he started his political career doing social media for the Liberal Democrats. Now Alvise Pérez, a new member of the European parliament, has more than a million followers on Instagram and is dividing Spain with his anti-immigration agenda. Pérez, 34, has left few people in his country indifferent since his political movement, Se Acabó la Fiesta — The Party’s Over — won three seats and nearly 5 per cent of the vote in European elections in June. He is seen by some as a political snake oil merchant who preaches xenophobic populism, but others consider him an anti-establishment hero crusading against relaxed border controls and corruption. Witnessing at first hand Britain’s “massive, uncontrolled” immigration was the making of Pérez’s politics, he told The Times. “England is suffering an absolutely extreme polarisation due to not knowing how to deal with a problem that has been germinating for years,” he said. “How to defend British values with the massive uncontrolled entrance of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who do not share a common language, religion or culture. “It is going to happen here — either we tackle the roots of the problem or there will be an even more extreme polarisation.” In person, Pérez looks much like other Spanish right-wingers — slicked-back hair, a suit, and wrist bands bearing the colours of the Spanish flag and police forces. But Pérez is a new kind of politician: he has no party, no manifesto and no university degree. Instead he has evolved a highly personalised profile, mobilising followers via social media on single “wedge” issues — in his case immigration and corruption. His girlfriend, Andrea de las Heras, was a runner-up in the Miss Spain beauty contest four years ago.
via thetimes: The alt-right Spanish leader promising to destroy a ‘rotten system’