TOrre-Pacheco, agricultural city of the Murcia region (Spain), experienced several nights of xenophobic violence in mid-July. It all started when a 68 -year -old retiree, Domingo D., said he was attacked by three young people of Maghreb origin on July 9. The news item was quickly relayed on social networks, accompanied by a video – denied later – presented as proof of the attack.
In this context, several local elected officials, including the regional president of Vox, José Angel Antelo, publicly bind immigration and crime, while the town hall organizes a demonstration against insecurity. The following days, groups of armed men patrolled in the districts with a large population of immigrants, causing clashes, destruction and making several injured. It was only after five days, and after sending police reinforcements, that the situation began to stabilize.
These events are not isolated. They are part of a series of similar episodes that occurred elsewhere in Europe, such as the xenophobic riots of Dublin in 2023, the mobilizations against the allocation of social housing to a family of Roma in Casal Bruciato, in Rome, in 2019, the antimigrant violence in Chemnitz in Germany in 2018, or the attacks against non -governmental organizations and exiles on the island Greek of Lesbos. Everywhere, the extreme right seeks to present these mobilizations as the spontaneous expression of popular exasperation in the face of immigration. But what do these episodes of its territorial anchor and its media strategies tell us? First of all, events such as those of Torre-Pacheco testify neither spontaneous impulses nor of an unprecedented progression of the extreme right.
Trigger a “moral panic”
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