The Madrid town of Alpedrete woke up this morning with a Nazi flag painted on a wall in a central park. The local group Más Madrid reported the incident early in the morning and by noon, municipal cleaning services had already removed it. The mayor, the popular Juan Rodríguez, who governs in coalition with Vox, condemned the action, which Más Madrid places in a context of “emboldenment” of the most extreme far right.
“We have proceeded as quickly as possible to remove it, together with the members of the Works Department, whom I would like to congratulate for their prompt action,” the mayor told the magazine Más Vive. He added that the graffiti “does not reflect the feelings of the majority of residents” and insisted that the government team “does not support this type of action” nor is it “in favour of Nazi symbolism”. “We are not going to allow those who want to symbolise Alpedrete as a fascist municipality to do so,” he stressed.
The councilor was involved in a controversy with the municipal nomenclature last spring after deciding remove from the plan references to the actors Francisco Rabal and Asunción Balaguera measure that the opposition and the family attributed to his communist militancy and that the mayor never fully explained. After the intervention of the leader of the Madrid PP, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the mayor backtracked. Santiago Abascal, for his part, ended up saying that the councilors of his party had supported the name change “by mistake”.
This is not the first time that Alpedrete has suffered actions by far-right or directly Nazi groups. The municipality “has always had a certain reputation for hosting organized fascist groups,” recalls the councilor of Más Madrid, Paco Miranda, who points out that ten years ago there were episodes of beatings for this reason. During the left-wing tripartite that governed between 2015 and 2019, an observatory against violence and intolerance was created. “The visible part stopped there, I don’t know if the invisible part stopped,” he says.
Ultras, “try to see what’s happening”
The return of the right to power, especially since Vox entered the municipality in 2023, and the mayor’s temporizing attitude have served to “embolden” the far-right radicals, according to Miranda, who highlights the proliferation of stickers with fascist messages on the road signs of the city of 15,000 inhabitants, or the parade of radicals with banners on the edge of legality during the May festivities. “I can put a sticker on it, but you can’t make a swastika in 10 minutes. “They are trying to see what is happening,” he says about the behavior of the ultras, while warning: “We don’t want what happened 10 years ago to happen again.”
