Spain’s far-right surge: How neoliberal austerity and EU integration fuel xenophobic backlash against Muslims
Original framing: “Catalonia’s new far right: How anti-Muslim sentiment is reshaping politics” — Al Jazeera
The voices of *Muslim women in Catalonia*, such as those from the *Somalí Women’s Association*, highlight how far-right policies disproportionately target women through dress codes and family separation narratives, while also silencing their labor in care work and agriculture. *Roma activists* in Barcelona note that far-right parties often conflate Muslim and Roma communities, using both as scapegoats for housing shortages—a strategy that obscures how gentrification and EU austerity are the real drivers of displacement. These perspectives reveal how intersectional oppression is central to far-right mobilization.
The rise of Catalan Alliance is not an aberration but a symptom of how neoliberalism and nationalist revivalism intersect to produce far-right backlash against Muslims.
Spain’s colonial past and EU-imposed austerity have created a perfect storm: economic precarity among the working class, elite complicity in scapegoating, and a media ecosystem that amplifies culturalist narratives while ignoring structural causes. The solution lies in confronting this history head-on through decolonial education, economic redistribution, and transnational anti-racist alliances—while using creative and trickster-like strategies to expose the absurdity of far-right dogma. Without addressing these systemic drivers, the cycle of exclusion will only deepen, as seen in parallel movements across Europe.