Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP has adopted the racist discourse of the mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, in the face of an open electoral competition on the right. On his return from vacation, the Catalan mayor pointed out on Twitter a group of migrants as future criminals. “There are situations that we all see, that we think about and that some write about,” said the secretary general, Cuca Gamarra. But 1,000 kilometers away, in one of the epicentres of the “humanitarian crisis” that they denounce and with much higher rates of multiculturalism, the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, also of the PP, proposes the reception and humanitarian treatment of those who enter Spain irregularly.
“When they arrive in Barcelona, they will be distributed among the surrounding towns, including I suppose #Badalona. What will happen next, most of us probably already know. It will end up like France sooner rather than later. “At the same time,” Albiol wrote last August as he disembarked from the ferry that was taking him from Ibiza to Barcelona, where he reportedly met a group of muscular Moroccan men. He then went on a televised tour to endorse his tweet to clarify that his hand had not gotten too hot.
No PP leader responded to Albiol’s remarks in the first days. In fact, several defended their right to express their opinion, until Gamarra’s definitive support. Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s “number two” considered this statement as something that “everyone” sees and thinks, but that only some “write.”
One of those people who says what “everyone” sees is Feijóo himself. During the Catalan election campaign, the PP leader incited a xenophobic discourse expressly linking migrants to crime and insecurity. His national spokesperson, Borja Sémper, adopted the words of his leader, who then insisted on the European elections. The emergence of Alvise Pérez pushed the PP to redouble its efforts: “We have the right to go out into the streets in complete safety.”
The PP’s turn came before last May. Feijóo already recovered Albiol for campaign management in January. The mayor of the third most populated city in Catalonia has built his entire political career, which has lasted almost two decades, precisely on the foundations of racist discourse since in 2007 he tried for the first time to attack the city hall.
In 2011, he succeeded and, apart from a few specific tactical moments, he never abandoned his diatribes against foreigners. In that campaign, he focused his attacks on Romanians, whom he called “harmful people who only came to commit crimes” and pitted his fellow citizens against each other: “Those who have been paying taxes for years get access to aid before those who have just paid taxes. finished arriving.
As mayor, he got along very well with the current leader of Vox Jorge Buxadé, who billed tens of thousands of euros to an opaque foundation with municipal participation, which ended up hiring him. Buxadé was the spokesperson for the ultra party and devoted a good part of his interventions to the criminalization of migrants. During the recent European election campaign, he declared: “Morocco is emptying its prisons and sending criminals to Europe.”
Albiol reached his highest level of notoriety at the state level in 2015, when he saw the mayor’s seat in danger and sought re-election under the slogan “clean up Badalona.”
He did not succeed and a left-wing candidate took power in the city, but the ungovernability of the municipal plenary session caused several changes of government until the PP politician regained command. In short: his name appeared in the so-called “Pandora Papers” linked to a Belizean company that operated in Andorra and was active during his first term.
To recover the mayoralty of the main Catalan city that the PP has never governed, Albiol lowered his tone during the 2023 campaign: “I don’t want to change your ideology, I want to change Badalona,” was his slogan. The supposed moderation was short-lived.
In 2023, Badalona had 36,560 foreigners, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics collected by the Generalitat of Catalonia. 16% of the total population that the INE determined for the city in the same year.
Instead of following Albiol, if it wanted to, the PP could adopt the discourse of another leader on the other side of Spain. Ceuta is a city of 18.5 square kilometers, located in the north of the African continent and crossed by a metal fence that separates it from Morocco. Its authorities boast of the close relationship in which citizens of four religions coexist: Christian, Muslim, Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Hindu. Muslim inhabitants represent about 40% of the population.
This Tuesday, in the program ‘Al Rojo Vivo’ of La Sexta, the president of Ceuta, Juan Vivas, received a question that seemed to make him uncomfortable. They asked him for an assessment of the xenophobic tweet of his party colleague linking crime and immigration.
Although the leader of Ceuta avoided giving a direct answer, his position was clear. “In Ceuta, we have made respect and coexistence a way of being and living. In Ceuta, all the people of Ceuta feel that they belong to Spain, no matter what we think, no matter if we pray as we pray and if we call each other as we call each other. I firmly believe that coexistence makes us better, more open and more tolerant. It enriches us culturally, it makes us more human, better,” he said.
Vivas later stressed: “If you compare this speech with what Mr. Albiol said, you can already draw conclusions about what I think.” In case there were any doubts about his speech, he added: “Experience shows us that diversity is a source of enrichment and not of impoverishment.”
This is not an isolated interview, it is the discourse that Vivas has held in recent years that shows the different way of doing politics of two officials who share activism and responsibilities in places with high immigration rates. Both represent two discourses to address the different origins that coexist in the cities they govern. That of Vivas, which highlights coexistence. That of Albiol, which stirs up hatred.
The proximity of Morocco explains the multiculturalism of Ceuta’s society, but it also reinforces the impulse of many of its inhabitants to claim their patriotism and belonging to Spain, given that the neighboring country does not recognize the Spanishness of Ceuta or Melilla. The Alawite kingdom uses different political movements, such as delaying the opening of commercial customs in the autonomous cities or blocking special visas for cross-border workers, to demonstrate its refusal to recognize Spanish sovereignty in both enclaves.
And Vivas does not respond with a speech that associates immigration and the different origins of its population with a threat. The president defends the feeling of belonging to Spain of its inhabitants, as well as the protection of “the unity of the people of Ceuta in the defense of Hispanicness, without distinction of belief, origin or culture”, as he stated a few months ago in an interview with elDiario.is.
Ceuta is also one of the territories that receives the most migrant minors. The small number of entries of swimming children, mostly Moroccan, is frequent, although since mid-August it has increased considerably. Last week, hundreds of people, many of them minors, tried to reach the city by this route, which led them to evacuate Tarajal beach for a few hours.
Relationship with Vox
Despite Ceuta’s saturated resources, Vivas has not filed any complaints against these minors. Nor does its population generally respond with xenophobic proclamations to the arrival of migrants, although part of Ceuta’s society observes this phenomenon with some concern given the city’s small size and meager resources. It is common for citizens to do everything they can to help those who are not intercepted by the Civil Guard, or even to defend them.
Vivas is also one of the most belligerent PP leaders in his responses to the far-right party, with which Vivas reached an agreement to be able to govern the city. It was their xenophobic demands that pushed the president of Ceuta to break his pact with those of Santiago Abascal.
“When preparing the 2021 budgets, they wanted to transfer their ideology of coexistence into the document and, in order not to ruin Ceuta, we became convinced, in the middle of the pandemic, that we could not continue,” explained Vivas.
The situation is the opposite of what happened in the rest of Spain, where the PP acquired extensive regional and municipal power last year thanks to its alliances with the extreme right.
In exchange, the presidents and mayors of Feijóo had to assume the ideological frameworks of Vox. In areas such as equality, memory, culture … and also in immigration policy. Until the people of Abascal wanted it. Before this summer, in which the arrival of people from continental Africa in Spain increased, they forced the machine to position itself in the nascent debate that, over the months, ended up dominating the political debate. Vox broke the regional governments on the transfer of migrant minors from the Canary Islands and Ceuta to their territories. Vivas had already broken two years ago.
