In Spain, far-right groups are continuing the offensive against immigrants under the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE)-Sumar government.
For two consecutive weekends, fascist groups have mobilized across towns in Spain to assault migrants. From July 12 to 15, several hundred far-right militants attacked Moroccan migrant workers living in the town of Torre Pacheco, in the region of Murcia. Armed with baseball bats and pepper spray, they assaulted residents, smashed vehicles, and vandalized immigrant-owned businesses such as kebab shops.
On July 19, 170 fascists gathered illegally in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in front of a large immigrant detention center, chanting slogans such as “Christian Spain, not Muslim,” “This is our land and we must defend it,” and “Immigration destroys your nation.”
The trigger for the fascist assault in Torre Pacheco was a report of a beating of a local resident by individuals of North African origin who were passing through the town. The attack was condemned by townspeople, including local Muslim residents.
Torre Pacheco is a town of 41,000 inhabitants, of whom 31 percent are foreigners from up to 96 different nationalities. More than 50 percent of these (around 6,300 people in 2025) are Moroccans, many of whom have lived there for over 20 years and have children born in Spain. Agriculture is the main economic activity in the town, with 60 percent of agricultural contracts held by immigrants, especially Moroccans, who work in manual agricultural labor, greenhouses, and field services.
These workers represent the most brutally exploited sector of the working class in Spain, performing hard labor with long hours and low wages. Many are undocumented, working under near-slavery conditions without contracts or labor rights. They also suffer from poor housing conditions, with little investment and a lack of public services in the neighborhoods where they live.
As early as 2020, the Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers called on unions and progressive political parties to support them to achieve a “dignified” job so that “unscrupulous exploiters no longer continue reaping enormous sums of profits at the expense of dividing workers and deregulating the labor market.” Five years later, neither the unions nor those so-called progressive parties like the Socialist Party (PSOE), Podemos, or Sumar, despite being in government, have done anything to improve the conditions of these workers.
In the case of Alcalá de Henares, the fascists used the alleged rape committed by a resident of the CAED (Reception, Emergency, and Referral Center) as a pretext. This center houses 1,700 immigrants from West Africa, especially from countries such as Mali and Senegal, who have arrived via the dangerous maritime routes crossing the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. As of May this year, the NGO Caminando Fronteras has reported 1,865 deaths or disappearances of people attempting to reach Spain through these maritime routes.
Immigrants live in overcrowded conditions, receive insufficient clothing, scarce and poor-quality food, and are not allowed to bring in food from outside. They lack adequate medical and social services and stop receiving financial aid after the fourth month.
The far right’s claim that crime has increased due to immigrants at the CAED is completely false. Since its opening in October 2023, the 7,000 people who have passed through the center have committed 17 crimes, compared to 14,500 committed by the rest of the local population.
The atmosphere for these far-right attacks was previously prepared by the fascist party Vox. At the beginning of July, they proposed the “remigration” of up to 7 million immigrants who could be expelled if they “do not integrate” or commit crimes, regardless of whether they have Spanish nationality, as is the case with many of the workers in Torre Pacheco attacked by fascists.
Vox tried to justify its statements by declaring: “Some who are so worried about the end of the world, about climate change, should worry more about the end of Spain due to demographic replacement. In 2045, Spaniards will be a minority in their own country.”
“Remigration” is Vox’s version of the executive order “Protecting The American People Against Invasion,” launched by Trump in January, which presents immigration as a serious threat to national security and public safety, and under which the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has already deported 150,000 people.
But this fascist offensive against immigrants does not come out of nowhere; it continues the offensive carried out in recent years by the PSOE governments with their pseudo-left allies Podemos and Sumar. The big difference is that these governments did not mobilize gangs of fascists and lumpenized elements, but rather the army and the police, both Spanish and from African countries.
In May 2021, the PSOE-Podemos government deployed the army against migrants crossing from Morocco trying to reach Spain. It was the first time the army was deployed against refugees. Subsequently, Spain returned hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children to Morocco, in a blatant violation of international law.
In June 2022, PSOE and Podemos pressured NATO to include migration as a “hybrid threat” in NATO’s new political roadmap. This was how the Spanish and European bourgeoisie intended to justify repression against immigrants and military interventions in Africa.
The first practical implication of this “hybrid threat” occurred on June 22, 2022, when the Moroccan gendarmerie and the Spanish Civil Guard attacked 2,000 migrants—from countries such as Chad, Niger, Sudan, and South Sudan—who should have had access to asylum under international law, at the Melilla border crossing. The result was 37 officially dead immigrants, a figure that Amnesty International puts at one hundred, and dozens more seriously injured and missing.
President Sánchez justified the massacre by saying, “It was a violent attack on the borders of our country; they were armed,” and he defended that the Spanish government “has always been proportional in its response to migration crises.” Podemos also excused the massacre and refused to call for any investigation or the resignation of any minister.
In recent years, the PSOE governments—first in coalition with Podemos and now with its split-off, Sumar—have followed the European Union’s directives by advancing the so-called “externalization of borders”: outsourcing the dirty work to countries like Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, or Gambia. These countries repress migration flows at any cost, in exchange for money, military equipment, diplomatic favors, and turning a blind eye to the repression of their own citizens.
Among the practices used is the so-called “desert dump”: arbitrarily detaining migrants, confiscating their belongings, transporting them in buses or police vehicles to desert areas, and abandoning them there without any assistance.
PSOE and its partners maintain over a hundred members of the Spanish Civil Guard deployed in these countries to support, among other tasks, the training of local police forces in repressive techniques—techniques that can later also be used against their own populations.
PSOE, Podemos, and Sumar have adopted policies that historically would have been associated with the far right, now fully aligned with their partnership with NATO imperialism and their support for the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
To intensify this imperialist and militarist agenda, the PSOE–Sumar government is set to significantly increase its military budget in the coming years, aiming to reach the 5 percent of GDP target committed to by NATO member states. This funding will also be used to escalate repression against immigrants.
The other side of the violence against immigrants and the rise in militarism is the repression of workers in Spain—aimed at deepening their exploitation and preventing any opposition to Spanish imperialism. In the weeks leading up to these fascist attacks, the strike by metalworkers in Cádiz was brutally repressed by the PSOE–Sumar government, which criminalized the Cádiz workers by launching a repressive operation—dubbed “Fuego”—that resulted in 24 arrests on charges of public disorder and assaulting the authorities.
Days later, in Torre Pacheco, only a minimal police presence was deployed, allowing fascist gangs to march through the town and attack workers for several days. In Alcalá, the police allowed a fascist rally to take place despite it being illegal.
PSOE, Podemos, Sumar, and their sister parties across Europe abandoned the working class—both native and immigrant—long ago. They offer nothing but austerity, repression, and imperialist wars. Their policies are increasingly indistinguishable from those of the far right. The fascists take advantage of this to channel social discontent in a reactionary direction, promoting xenophobia and hatred against immigrants in order to divide the working class along national lines.
In both Europe and Spain, the social democrats and the pseudo-left are the main enablers of the far right. Workers can expect nothing from these parties—they must rely only on their own strength. In its July 22 perspective, the WSWS stated:
“The working class must reject all efforts to divide it along national, racial or ethnic lines. The fight to defend immigrant workers can succeed only through the unified mobilization of the working class as a whole—black, white, native-born, immigrant, documented and undocumented alike.
“This means organizing independently of the capitalist parties and building rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood to oppose deportation operations and prepare collective action using the immense social power of the working class.”