On July 29, a prominent politician from the far-right Vox party waved a Spanish flag at the country’s border with Gibraltar, calling for the territory to be “suffocated.” British since 1704, the tiny peninsula today counts a mixed European and Moroccan community of just over thirty thousand people. Its economy is closely linked to the populations on Spain’s southern tip: official statistics estimate that between ten and fifteen thousand workers cross the border every day to work in industries such as construction and hospitality in neighboring towns.

Despite these close ties, the Spanish far right’s agitation at the border seeks to pour fuel on a long-standing “culture war” — and exploit the alleged weakness of the country’s center-left government over the Gibraltar issue. While this administration, uniting Pedro Sánchez’s socialist PSOE with the leftist Unidas Podemos, prioritizes European cooperation, the Right uses Gibraltar as a whack-a-mole for energizing a nationalist audience.

This has been a long-standing grievance of the Spanish far right. Dictator Francisco Franco’s closure of the border from 1969 to 1982 in a bid to blockade Gibraltar into submitting to Spanish rule was arguably one of the regime’s most embarrassing failures. The gates, though now guarding a relatively fluid border, still stand as they did then.