As Spain’s European election results were announced on June 9, influencer Alvise Pérez summoned his followers to a Madrid nightclub to celebrate the over eight hundred thousand votes for his new political platform, The Party’s Over (Se Acabó La Fiesta). With the scale of his breakthrough surpassing poll predictions, Alvise was in a triumphant mood as he addressed the crowd of mostly younger male supporters gathered on the dance floor. “Spain has become a fiesta for criminals, for the corrupt, for mercenaries, for paedophiles and rapists,” he insisted — before going on to reiterate his campaign promise to build Europe’s largest jail outside Madrid to lock up all those involved in political sleaze and drug trafficking.

The Party’s Over’s haul of three seats in the European parliament (and 4.6 percent of the national vote) saw it finish ahead of radical-left Podemos and only eleven thousand votes behind deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz’s faltering left-green Sumar coalition. This is a remarkable result, given it was achieved with practically no television airtime or mainstream media coverage. Instead, the campaign was organized nearly entirely through Alvise’s personal social media accounts, with instant-messaging platform Telegram playing a particularly central role.

Alvise rose to prominence within Spain’s online far-right ecosystem during the pandemic, as he spread anti-vaccine propaganda and fabricated smears against progressive politicians. Though his online activities have been funded by many of the same ultraconservative Catholic organizations that back the post-Francoist Vox, his discourse eschews the latter’s traditional authoritarian Spanish nationalism. Instead, Alvise’s campaign employed conspiracy-driven narratives and a symbology resembling that of QAnon and the online culture of the US alt-right. The Party’s Over even has a meme of a “rebel squirrel” with an Anonymous mask for its logo.