Only one party in Spain is currently making that argument, and the speaker at the rally, Alicia Rubio, helps run its get-out-the-vote efforts. That party is Vox.

Read: How Spain misunderstood the Catalan independence movement

Vox—the word is Latin for “voice”—was founded in 2013 by a handful of conservative politicians who’d grown disenchanted with the People’s Party, the traditional right-wing bloc in Spain, for not adopting more hard-line stances against secessionists and progressive legislation passed under the former Socialist government. But it burst into Spain’s national consciousness only late last year, when it campaigned and won 12 seats in the regional legislature in Andalusia, in southern Spain, the first time any of its candidates had been elected to office. The party’s shocking ascent to power was, at first, ascribed to its stance against separatism in the northern Spanish region of Catalonia—Vox called the country’s dominant parties soft on separatists and campaigned on a “Spain first” ticket.

In many ways, its rise mirrors advances made by populist and far-right parties across Europe. A decade of slow economic growth, dislocations caused by the global financial crisis, and the vast wave of migration that has hit Europe in recent years have fueled disenchantment with traditional political groupings across the region. Spain had, for a time, been a rare exception to that shift. And in a way, that remains the case: Whereas most of the continent’s populist parties want to either gut the EU or leave it altogether, Vox’s focus is different. While blatant anti-feminist rhetoric is often employed by political parties in eastern Europe, such efforts are markedly less frequent in the west of the continent. That was, of course, until Vox announced its first legislative push in Andalusia—to demand that the region’s gender-violence law be scrapped.

According to official figures, 992 women in Spain have been murdered by a partner or former partner since 2003. Though the term femicide—instances of women killed by men on account of their gender—wasn’t included in Spanish dictionaries until 2014, violence against women came into brutal focus with the murder of Ana Orantes in 1997, a woman from Granada who shocked the public, first when she spoke on an evening TV program about the abuse she suffered at her ex-husband’s hands for 40 years, and 13 days later, when her ex set her ablaze. Newspapers began tracking gender-based murders around 2000. In 2003, the government created its own registry, logging the number of women killed by partners or former partners. An independent study that includes femicides committed by men with no prior relationship with their victims estimates that the number is actually closer to 2,000. These figures, and numerous petitions by feminist organizations, prompted the national government to pass a historic anti-gender-violence law in 2004, allocating funds to support victims of abuse and calling for the creation of specific gender-violence courts. In late 2017, Spain’s parliament unanimously passed a series of measures designed to bulk up the original law. Even the People’s Party, which in 2013 threatened to roll back abortion rights, was on board.