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While the division between the people and the elite created by populism is typically understood within a national framework, the aim of this article is to analyse how the understanding of the people and the elite is constructed by the use of interwoven scales. By focusing on the scalar politics of the Spanish party Vox, the discursive articulation of space through scales are analysed. By means of a qualitative discourse analysis of six Twitter (now X) accounts of the most prominent leaders, we argue that the use of political spaces is strictly connected to the party’s broader political narrative. Concretely, the analysis of the spatial imaginaries evoked by Vox on Twitter shows the importance of different scales – local, regional, national and global – to organize its populist antagonism spatially. In so doing, this paper makes a contribution to the literature on ‘scalar politics’ of radical right parties, which has recently focused on different geographical constituencies. We argue that the national scale maintains its predominance in opposition to the global scale (dominated by the cosmopolitan elites), the regional one (where separatism represents a threat against Spain's unity), the local scale which is nationalized against migrants and people who do not feel as Spaniards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the visual representation of "the urban people" by the Spanish leftwing populist party Unidas Podemos (UP) during the campaign for regional elections in Madrid in 2021. The political environment was characterised by increasing polarisation and the hyper-leadership of two candidates, right-wing Isabel Díaz Ayuso and UP's national leader Pablo Iglesias. In this context, UP employed a diverse range of images and audiovisual material with a specific focus on the urban dimension. This paper explores how the populist logic and societal split--the people vs. the elite--deployed by UP are visually represented and connected with the urban space. Drawing on the central role of images in politics, this paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the visual and spatial dimensions of populism by (a) exploring the connections between populist imaginary, space, and the visual; (b) advancing an empirical analysis of the image of "the people" in a left-wing political party; and (c) connecting the imaginary of populism to its geo-graphical dimension, stressing both the urban and class divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]