Spain’s Far-Right Vox Party Is Inciting Racist Violence
Spain’s Vox party typically masks its racism in more palatable rhetoric. But this summer, leading Vox MPs helped incite violence against residents of Maghrebi origin in the Murcia region in Spain.
Vox leader Santiago Abascal fanned the flames of neo-Nazi groups calling for violence following several days of attacks on residents of Maghrebi origin in Torre Pacheco, Spain. (Eduardo Parra / Europa Press via Getty Images)
The pattern is all too familiar. Someone commits a crime, the far right seizes on it as supposed proof of their racist theories about the origins of crime, a particular group is targeted on social media, and violence begins — often fueled by conservative figures in parliament. This happened in the UK during the summer of 2024 and in the Murcia region of Spain just last month. The pretext was the assault of a local man in the town of Torre Pacheco in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula. The result was several days of attacks on the town’s residents of Maghrebi origin, carried out by hundreds of far-right militants who traveled in from other areas.
The violence in Torre Pacheco (population 40,000), which began on July 11, followed several less severe but similar incidents. Just days earlier, Sabadell, a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona, had seen multiple nights of racist attacks against migrant residents, triggered by a protest over insecurity allegedly caused by squatters of foreign origin. That same week, a mosque in the town of Piera, near Barcelona, was set on fire just before its inauguration.
Islamophobia and racism against workers from Morocco and other North African countries are the most common forms of racism in Spain. In previous years, there had been attacks on centers housing unaccompanied migrant minors, particularly in Catalonia and the Madrid region. However, this summer’s string of racist incidents marks a qualitative shift — it reveals that the far right has chosen the strategy of racist propaganda through violence.
On July 9, a local man was assaulted in Torre Pacheco, allegedly by a group of young men of Maghrebi origin. Shortly afterward, supposed footage of the assault began circulating in far-right and neo-Nazi Telegram groups — though, in fact, the videos depicted other attacks, including one in Mexico with no clear motive, and the beating of a homeless person.
The misinformation and calls to racist violence quickly spread from closed extremist forums to mainstream social media, where members of Vox — Spain’s far-right party, which holds thirty-three of the 350 seats in parliament — along with MEP Alvise Pérez and right-wing provocateurs used the incident to spread slogans such as “More Walls, Fewer Moors.” The call to action came from the Telegram channel of a neo-Nazi group called “Deport Them Now,” which incited a “hunt” to “send the attackers to Allah.” The group, little-known in Spain until recently, has openly promoted Nazi imagery and slogans.
But this incitement to violence might not have gained traction without the implicit support of Vox, which has also formed coalitions with the conservative Partido Popular (PP) in various regional and local governments. In a country where anti-migrant views are not yet as mainstream as elsewhere in Europe, Vox typically masks its racism in more palatable rhetoric. This time, however, their messaging was almost indistinguishable from that of the neo-Nazi groups calling for violence. In fact, Vox leader Santiago Abascal fanned the flames by posting a video in which he claimed that “Spain is suffering a brutal migratory invasion.”
The racist “hunt” in Torre Pacheco took place just days after Vox MP Rocío de Meer called for the deportation of “eight million people,” a “re-emigration” process that would include “the second generation,” because they “have not adapted to our customs and have, in many cases, contributed to insecurity.” This openly racist proposal echoes a plan secretly discussed in 2023 by German businessmen, neo-Nazis, and members of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to organize a mass deportation from Germany, which caused a scandal.
A “Hunt” for Migrants Fueled by Politicians in Suits and Ties
The violence began on July 11, following a rally organized by Torre Pacheco’s town council (led by the PP) to condemn the assault on the Spanish pensioner. Neither local authorities nor the PP-led regional government of Murcia had called for any such mobilization when serious cases of sexual assault against female migrant farmworkers by Spanish employers came to light, or when media outlets exposed the quasi-slavery conditions under which many migrant workers toil in Murcia’s and Andalusia’s greenhouses — whose fruit and vegetable exports supply much of Europe.
After the rally, a group of far-right militants from outside the town began to chase and assault residents of Maghrebi origin. The limited police presence was overwhelmed by the racist mob, which vandalized shops, set fire to bins, and attacked local neighbors. For several nights, hundreds of far-right activists terrorized the town to the extent that many migrant families were forced to barricade themselves indoors, as the under-resourced police failed to ensure their safety.
Groups of young residents faced the far-right militants in the street. Vox spokespeople refused to condemn the racist attacks and instead, continued to spread the false idea that migration has provoked a rise in insecurity in Spain — revealing an unprecedented level of coordination between the violent and parliamentary branches of the Spanish far right.
Gradually, police reinforcements were deployed, and the unrest was brought under control. On July 15, a private bodyguard from Mataró in Catalonia and the leader of “Deport Them Now” was arrested, and the government shut down the group’s Telegram channel. The riots left several injured, with 120 people identified by police and thirteen arrested.
Immigration as a Political Battleground
Until recently, Spain — along with Portugal — stood out as an exception to Europe’s sharp turn to the far right. While fringe conservative movements have arrived in several governments and strongly influenced mainstream parties, the Iberian Peninsula had remained relatively resistant until the past few years.
In Portugal, the end of the exception was clear in the May 2025 elections, when the far-right Chega party won over 20 percent of the vote. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez’s government survived the 2023 general election thanks to a fragile parliamentary coalition with Sumar, Catalan, Basque, and Galician parties, but the Right is rising; polls now put Vox at around 15 percent support — a result that would make Abascal’s party an indispensable ally for a potential government led by PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
This summer’s racist riots mark the climax (so far) of the Spanish far right’s strategic pivot toward anti-immigrant rhetoric. Immigration has now taken center stage as Vox’s main political battleground, displacing earlier obsessions with feminism and LGBTQ rights — issues that previously dominated the party’s agenda, rooted in the national-Catholic legacy of Francoism. In 2024, Vox’s decision to prioritize anti-immigration stances led it to break off regional governing alliances with the PP, after the conservatives agreed to redistribute unaccompanied migrant minors among Spain’s regions.
As in other European countries, the PP is being dragged toward increasingly radical positions by the hardening of the far-right narrative. Rather than opposing the racist rhetoric that fueled the violence in Torre Pacheco, Feijóo instead called for the “immediate” deportation of irregular migrants who commit crimes, a novelty in the PP stance toward migration and crime.
The racist calls to action in Torre Pacheco attracted hundreds of far-right militants, though the unrest did not spread to other parts of Spain, as it had in the UK the previous year. However, it also failed to trigger a strong response from Spanish social movements and the Spanish left, which focused more on demanding police and judicial intervention against the organized far right than on concrete solidarity with threatened migrant workers.
This is a worrying difference juxtaposed with the inspiring reaction of British anti-racist and anti-fascist movements to racist violence, which stems from the weaker tradition of anti-racist activism on the Left in Spain. To remain an exception to the generalization of racism in Europe, Spain’s social movements will need to prepare to confront future far-right attempts to spread racist propaganda through violence.