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.