The poster presents Isabel Pérez Moñino, spokesperson for Vox in the Madrid Assembly, and lawyer Ricardo Ruiz de la Serna, responsible for publications of the Disenso Foundation, the party’s laboratory of ideas chaired by Santiago Abascal. Presentation of the report announced Immigration and its negative economic impact on the welfare statecarried out by the said foundation. The call is for Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. at the Velada Hotel, in Mérida. Although it is an Extremadura campaign act, Óscar Fernández, Vox candidate, does not appear on the poster. The protagonist is her, Moñino, who enters the room where journalists wait and talk. In Extremadura, with the entry of immigrants and the departure of young Spaniards, the “perfect storm” is occurring to “change the identity” of the community, says Moñino. Behind, in silence, Óscar Fernández nods his head.
This is how Vox’s Extremadura campaign works. The star is Abascal. If he is not there, it is the more or less known leader who plays. Tuesday it was Moñino, who enjoys the attention of national television as the face of the party in its offensive against Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The next day, the Secretary General, Ignacio Garriga, promised in Cáceres to reduce funds intended for “menas centers”, unaccompanied foreign minors, and “pro-immigration NGOs”. On Thursday, Carlos Hernández Quero, housing spokesperson, declared in Badajoz that it was necessary to “review the regularizations of immigrants carried out by the bipartisan system” and to “control the concessions of nationality”.
Regardless of which leader has national impact, the anti-immigration message is a core ingredient on Vox’s menu during the 21-D campaign. In his program, he promises “a determined fight against growing insecurity and the rejection of mass immigration policies”. They go hand in hand, as usual, insecurity and immigration.
But the numbers don’t make it any easier for Abascal and his team in Extremadura with the national team. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the Spanish population on January 1, 2025 was 49.12 million people, of which 6.9 million were foreigners, or 14%. In the Community of Madrid, where Abascal, Moñino and Quero come from, the percentage is 16.6%. In Catalonia, the lands of Garriga, 18.7%. And in Extremadura? 4.41%. It is the community with the lowest proportion of foreign population recorded.
Some additional figures illustrate how the relatively low incidence of the migratory phenomenon in Extremadura reduces – at least, data in hand – the margin for repeating Vox’s speech in Cáceres and Badajoz in other regions of Spain. According to INE data, in Extremadura there are 10,840 censuses born in Morocco, the country where Vox nationals are most focused. They represent 1.02% of the population, or 3.6 times less than those born in this Maghreb country in Catalonia.
INE data are census data, that is to say they exclude irregular immigration. But specialists in demographic movements do not consider Extremadura as a preferred destination for irregular immigration, because it tends to be concentrated “in the most populated regions and in large cities, where the greatest economic activity is found,” explains Gonzalo Fanjul, research director of the porCausa Foundation and expert on the migratory phenomenon.
Housing and crime
The discourse that links the housing shortage to excessive immigration – that is, the Quero discourse – should also not be as easy to transfer to Extremadura as to other more urban and densely populated areas. With just over a million inhabitants, the population density in the community that holds the elections on December 21 is around 25.3 people per square kilometer, while in Spain it exceeds 95. There is only one city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, Badajoz (150,000).
From Abascal to Moñino to Jorge Buxadé, the message about the supposed need to react to insecurity in Extremadura is also common. This is despite the fact that it is a relatively safe community. According to a report prepared in September by the Government Delegation based on statistics from the Ministry of the Interior, the crime rate in Extremadura amounts to 34.2 criminal offenses per 1,000 inhabitants in twelve months. Despite a slight increase compared to the 32.9 of the previous twelve months, Extremadura positions itself as the safest community in Spain, with a rate lower than that of Asturias (35.6), Galicia (35.8) and La Rioja (36.8), and far behind the Balearic Islands (68.3), Catalonia (62.2) and the Community of Madrid (56.7).
To support its speech, Vox reiterates that sexual assaults have increased by 460% in Extremadura. Moñino herself gave the information, without specifying the period, during her appearance on Tuesday. A Vox spokesperson points out that Moñino is referring to an increase “since Pedro Sánchez has been in government.” The data coincides with the increase in penetrative assaults from 2017, when there were 10, to 2024, when there were 56, according to Interior data. The 2024 report is not broken down by nationality, although Moñino published the data as part of a message on the migration boom.
Before Tuesday’s event in Mérida, EL PAÍS asked Moñino if his diagnosis of the migratory phenomenon is the same in Madrid as in Extremadura. “Of course,” he replied. “Vox is a national party, we have a national program which applies to all of Spain. We have a program against mass immigration which particularly affects regions like Madrid and Catalonia, but which also affects Extremadura”, he added, before defending the expulsion from Spain of irregular immigrants, but also of those who are legally in Spain if they commit “serious crimes”, come to “live on public assistance” or want to “impose Islamism”.
For the moment, the CEI barometer for November shows that Extremadura residents are less concerned about immigration than Spaniards as a whole. 14.3% of the first cite immigration as one of the three main problems of the country, compared to 18.9% for the entire national territory, a percentage which reaches 23.4% in the case of Catalonia.
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