Μake us preferred on Google For more than two decades, Europe has been riven with division over immigration. For the past few years, Spain has stood out — the last big EU country with an unambiguous pro-immigration message.
Now that experiment is on the ballot in a general election next month, and the far-right party that expects to be the kingmaker is planning the wholesale reversal of a policy it labels as nothing less than “treachery”.
The populist Vox party, which polls say will hold the balance of power after Spain’s November 29 vote, accuses Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of promoting a “migrant invasion” through open borders and this year’s mass amnesty for as many as 1.2mn people who are in the country illegally.
According to Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, Sánchez is seeking to “replace the Spaniards he does not like” — meaning those who do not vote for the governing Socialist party.
Spain’s snap general election, called by Sánchez in the wake of protests over rising housing costs, now offers Vox the chance to claim the European far right’s biggest scalp yet by ousting the incumbent.
A surge in the immigrant population during the Socialist leader’s eight years in power “is one of the most significant phenomena of our time, because it’s been a massive social change, absolutely massive”, says María Miyar, a sociology professor at Spain’s Uned university.
Sánchez’s widely anticipated defeat could mean a swing from one extreme to the other, with the end of Europe’s only remaining experiment in permissive border controls. Vox would gain the chance to replace it with hardline anti-immigration policies of a kind never tried at national level in postwar western Europe.
Vox’s policies include the mass expulsion — or “remigration” — of all unauthorised immigrants it deems undesirable, including some who are legal residents. “We don’t care whether that means a hundred, a hundred thousand, a million or more,” Abascal recently told La Razón newspaper.
Vox also wants to create a two-tier society in which recent immigrants are barred from accessing the welfare state. “It’s pure common sense,” Abascal declared at a rally last week. “How can Spaniards not have priority in Spain, just as Moroccans do in Morocco?”
“Is Vox very extremist?” says Steven Forti, professor of contemporary history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “Yes, it’s very extremist, because of the alliances it has, the policies it supports, the language it uses and its tactics too.”
Elsewhere among the European far right, remigration is official policy at the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, now that country’s most popular party. Although France’s Rassemblement National (RN) does not use the term, it also wants to drastically tighten up immigration rules and encourage foreigners to leave.
Vox will not win Spain’s election. The mainstream conservative People’s Party is the clear favourite but has lost voters to Vox and is expected to fall short of a parliamentary majority. That means the PP’s only path to power would be a coalition deal or voting pact with the far right.
Polls suggest Vox has a grip on 18-19 per cent of the vote and is likely to record bigger gains than any other party. It is adamant that the price of its support will be the evisceration of Sánchez’s immigration legacy.
Between 2019 — the prime minister’s first full year in power — and 2026, the number of foreign-born residents in Spain surged by 3.5mn to 10mn, taking the country’s population to almost 50mn, according to the national statistics agency. Sánchez says immigrants have helped make Spain the rich world’s fastest-growing big economy, although growth in GDP per capita has been less impressive.
Abascal’s focus is not economics. “It seems like Spain has become a paradise for illegal immigration,” the Vox leader said at a rally last week. “This is heaven on earth.”
The prime minister’s response is to try to fan alarm about a PP-Vox government. “When you bring Vox into the equation, everything changes,” he said on a talk show last week. “We are no longer just talking about a change of government. We are talking about going backwards.” Such warnings have twin goals: to energise his leftwing base and stem the loss of moderate Socialist voters to the PP.
To Luisa Quiñones, 41, Sánchez’s amnesty was far from treachery. She had been living illegally in Madrid for three years, holding down two jobs as a cleaner and a carer for a pair of elderly sisters. Quiñones’s mother had persuaded her that Spain offered more safety and opportunities than her native Colombia, where she ran a rock music and fashion store. But being undocumented meant working in the shadows with no protection, no pension and a €7 hourly salary — below Spain’s minimum wage.
When the amnesty was announced, “everyone was so excited at having the chance to get a job that lets you receive social security benefits and, above all, sign a proper contract”, Quiñones recalls. Sánchez called it “an act of justice and a necessity”. Quiñones is now partway through the process of securing a renewable one-year residency permit.
But the prospect of a rightwing victory in November has darkened her outlook. “We’re all feeling the pressure, feeling the fear, waiting for the elections,” she says. “People are saying: ‘What will our future be?’”
Vox has replicated the hardline immigration rhetoric of US President Donald Trump in Europe. And, just as Trump has overseen a harsher crackdown in his second term than his first, Vox has hardened its own position over the past two years — a parallel that has not gone unnoticed by Quiñones.
“Those planes deporting people indiscriminately. It’s heartbreaking,” she says of forced removals from the US. “It’s what they want to do here.”
Fringe party to kingmaker
Vox was founded in 2013 by breakaway members of the PP, including a young Abascal, who were angry over the party’s inaction and corruption under then prime minister Mariano Rajoy. It spent its early years languishing in obscurity but got its first election breakthrough in 2018 by being Spain’s most vociferous opponent of Catalan separatism.
Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a co-founder who left the party in 2015, says its identity is rooted in “Spanish patriotism based on all the most glorious parts of Spain’s history, vigorous anti-leftism, Euroscepticism, conservatism and traditional Catholic values”. Over the years, the party provided a home to free-market liberals and nostalgics for Francisco Franco’s decades-long dictatorship, but social conservatives are now in the ascendancy.
Initially, immigration figured in Vox’s policy platform without being a priority. More recently, two things have pushed the issue to the top of its agenda.
The first was Trump’s return to the White House last year with a tougher stance on immigration. The second was the impact of immigrant-driven population growth. Previously, immigration was seen mainly as an issue of unauthorised migrants from Africa arriving on small boats in the Canary Islands. Now it is something with tangible effects on the daily lives of mainland Spaniards.
A quarter of a century ago, one in 20 people in Spain was born overseas. Now the figure is one in five, a higher proportion than even in the US. But “we don’t have more police officers, we don’t have more hospitals, we don’t have more housing”, Abascal says. “Waiting lists are getting longer, housing is getting more expensive, people are living in terrible conditions . . . This is leading to the collapse of society, and we cannot accept that.”
Jordan Bardella, president of the French far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) party and Leader of the far-right VOX party, Santiago Abascal arrive for a breakfast forum in Madrid, Spain, October 13, 2026. REUTERS/Juan Medina
Vox’s initial growth depended on peeling voters away from the PP. Now it is attracting young people from low-income neighbourhoods, whose parents voted socialist, by channelling their unease over immigration. Ignacio Varela, a newspaper columnist at El Confidencial, says that mirrors the strategy of Marine Le Pen’s RN and its forebear the Front National, founded by her late father Jean-Marie. “The working class feels the competition from people who come from who knows where, and who are willing to accept working conditions they themselves would not accept,” Varela adds. “It’s pure Le Pen-ism.”
The party has historically been close to former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, while both RN leader Jordan Bardella and Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian president, have visited Spain and endorsed Abascal recently. Trump saluted Abascal for doing a “great job” from the stage of the CPAC conservative conference last year.
Czech Motorist Party’s leader Petr Macinka, former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) leader Martin Helme, Portugal’s far-right political party Chega leader Andre Ventura, Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders , Spain’s far-right party Vox leader Santiago Abascal and French far-right leader and member of parliament Marine Le Pen, President of the French far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) party parliamentary group, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and Greek leader of “Voice of Reason” party Afroditi Latinopoulou and co-leader of Polish far-right political alliance Confederation Krzysztof Bosak stand on stage at Spanish far-right party VOX rally with other European far-right leaders, in Madrid, Spain, February 8, 2025. REUTERS/Ana Beltran
Forti of Autonomous University says Vox sits squarely within Europe’s “family” of far-right and rightwing populist parties, arguing they share the same core beliefs even though their choices of tone and tactics vary. While Le Pen and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have opted for a form of “pseudo-moderation”, Forti says, Vox has decided “to show its most radical side if necessary, because that’s what they believe, and what they think will work”.
“We say very clearly that anyone who enters Spain illegally must be repatriated immediately,” Abascal has said. “Anyone who comes to Spain to commit crimes will be deported immediately, without hesitation. And anyone who comes to Spain to receive welfare benefits that are not reaching our own people must start the remigration process.”
Asked if people granted legal status under Sánchez’s amnesty could stay, he told La Razón: “We’ll have to see, because there are some things that can be reversed.”
There are doubts, however, about whether Vox could fulfil its promises. Abascal acknowledges “a lot of resistance” to its ideas in the PP, but the balance of power in any pact between the parties will ultimately depend on their relative vote shares. There are also legal obstacles to deporting lawful residents, even though new EU rules making it easier to remove unauthorised immigrants came into force this month.
Business leaders complain there is no meaningful debate about what immigration means for them. In the construction sector — crucial to fixing Spain’s housing shortage — immigrants make up one-third of all on-site workers, according to Pedro Fernández Alén, president of CNC, a construction trade group. He laments the lack of discussion about linking grants of legal residency to immigrants’ qualifications or training.
Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos, said the conservative PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is saying as little as possible about immigration because “it’s an issue that favours Vox” and the PP knows its more moderate stance could be portrayed as weakness.
Vox’s deportation rhetoric also has ethno-racial undertones. Its politicians are careful not to explicitly criticise Latin Americans, even though they are the largest group of both legal and unauthorised immigrants. That silence reflects the common language and faith Latinos share with many Spaniards, which is also a reminder of Spain’s former imperial greatness. Vox also likes to laud them as hard working.
In stark contrast, the party is openly hostile to Muslim immigrants, most of whom are from Morocco. Hermann Tertsch, a Vox member of the European parliament, told the FT this year that only a minority of them had jobs. “Illegal Muslim immigration,” he said, “is a bomb at the heart of our cultural and social fabric.”
Ignacio de Hoces, Vox’s deputy secretary for political action, adds that the party wants to ban the wearing of burkas and niqabs in public spaces. He says Vox is not opposed to Muslims but to the “ideology we call Islamism”. Islamists “want to impose cultures here that are completely alien to us and run contrary to the very dignity of women”, he says. “Of course, we want all these people to go home.”
Last year, in one of Spain’s worst recent episodes of civil unrest, violence erupted in Torre Pacheco, Murcia, after a 68-year-old Spanish man was assaulted by three North African youths. The attack triggered several days of clashes between locals and Muslim immigrants as far-right groups issued online calls to “hunt” foreigners.
José Ángel Antelo, then Vox’s regional leader, was accused of fuelling the trouble. Spaniards, he said, were tiring of illegal immigrants who “rape our daughters and wives and assault our old people and homosexuals”.
The regional litmus test
The prospect of Vox governing with the PP is already a reality in four Spanish regions where the conservative party has needed the support of its far-right rival to take power in the past 12 months.
In each of them, Vox secured a big win by striking a coalition deal that included another of its totems: a tiered “national priority” system that puts Spaniards first in line to access welfare benefits, public services and government housing — and denies them to at least some immigrants.
Political scientists call it “welfare chauvinism”. The idea is familiar in France, where people first heard Jean-Marie Le Pen talk about it in the 1980s. AfD is advocating it in Germany too. Vox, however, is the first to put it into action.
One Vox politician said the policy was as natural as caring for your own children ahead of your neighbours. Camas at Ipsos says: “The reasons vary, but it’s an idea that has taken hold and resonates with many people, including some who won’t be voting for Vox.”
Aragón in north-east Spain now has such a PP-Vox coalition. Santiago Morón, a senior Vox lawmaker in the region, rejects the charge that “national priority” is motivated by xenophobia. Instead, he maintains that defunding immigrants is a way to save money to ensure sustainable healthcare, education and pension systems for Spaniards.
“Financial resources are finite. They can’t be stretched any further,” he says. Referring to rioting in France, which began with anger over underfunded schools, he adds: “We must avoid reaching that situation.”
FILE PHOTO: Housing crisis-related signs cover a tarp at a protest camp in Puerta del Sol square following the eviction of the late 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, sparking nationwide housing protests, in Madrid, Spain, October 17, 2026. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura/File Photo
Vox’s critics note that legal immigrants pay taxes and social security into state coffers. More fundamentally, they say, Vox is promising something it cannot deliver: due to the equality principle in Spain’s constitution, foreigners who are legal residents share certain rights with Spaniards and cannot be denied public aid on the basis of their nationality.
For that reason, in the most substantive example of the “national priority” in action, a €491,000 support fund for families with twins, triplets or multiple adoptions is available only to people who have lived legally in Aragón for the past five years. There is no nationality requirement.
Pilar Alegría, a former Sánchez minister who is now head of the Socialist party in Aragón, says that criterion makes the money inaccessible to a Spanish citizen from the region who has recently returned home after living overseas or elsewhere in Spain. “You’ve lost the priority,” she tells the FT.
The PP notes that the small print in its Aragón coalition deal refers not to Spaniards but to prioritising those who maintain a “real, lasting and verifiable” connection to the area. Vox’s Morón says a new Aragón housing bill, the first legislation to include “national priority”, will ensure no Spaniards are excluded.
Ana Palacio, a former PP foreign minister, argues the policy squares with an EU increasingly worried about its own autonomy, resource security and defence. “Ultimately, it’s a consequence of a European project that is changing,” she says. “A continent that once considered itself rich and generous now feels like it’s under siege.”
Socialists say Vox has an ulterior motive: using national priority to distract from regional governments’ under-investment in welfare and public services.
Alegría accuses Vox of tapping into Spaniards’ “visceral emotions” to turn Moroccan immigrants in particular into scapegoats for problems such as long waits at public health clinics.
“We cannot go down that path of hatred, anger, confrontation and violence,” she says. “They manage to stir up the most primitive emotions we all have, to direct your anger at someone more vulnerable than you.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela
Link To FT.com: https://www.ft.com/content/59e2c942-df87-4b17-a9d1-e3956f37b45f
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