Vox, stop censura

The animation film based on the Toy Story character Buzz, features a brief kiss on the lips between two female partners. It was banned by the town hall of Bezana in Cantabria in common with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and more than ten other Muslim countries on its release last June. Vox leader Santiago Abascal, when quizzed by Antena3 journalist Susanna Griso, said Catholics considered it "was sexualising children at an early age".

A theatrical adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, commissioned by a PP-Ciudadanos administration in Valdemorillo, Madrid, also fell victim to censorship once the PP signed a pact with Vox to run the town hall and the far-right party took over the Culture and Tourism department. Considered a feminist classic, the 1928-published novel explores issues of androgyny and features a male English nobleman poet, born in Elizabethan times, who undergoes a mysterious sex change and lives for more than 300 years as a woman.

The theatre company's founder wrote: "We were told by phone that it was not to the councillor's liking that during the performance the male protagonist became a woman." Later the town hall claimed the decision not to host the play in the autumn, as planned, was due "to budgetary problems".

Concerned by these actions, and others, such as the cancellation of a Civil War-era play about a local Republican schoolteacher by the PP-led town of Briviesca in Burgos, a call for an end to censorship has been made.

The Plataforma de Artes Libres issued an online statement supported by institutions such as the Centro Dramático Nacional, the Academia de las Artes Escénicas, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores and the Unión de Actores y Actrices. The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, tweeted that without "culture there is no democracy".

More than 300 of Spain's leading cultural figures, including film director Pedro Almodóvar and actor Javier Bardem, have also signed a manifesto urging voters to go to the ballot boxes on 23 July and vote for progressive options.

The presentation of that manifesto, read by the actress Amparo Climent, stated that the upcoming elections are "decisive" as they coincide with "a new conservative offensive, with a far-right drift".

That is the nub of the matter: it is increasingly clear that, in order to gain power the Partido Popular is willing to accommodate the far-right's xenophobic agenda.

Ironically, Abascal wants Vox to lead the Ministry of Culture to halt the "kidnapping of culture by false elites".

To barbarity, and beyond!