In the middle of July, a series of events unfolded in the town of Torre-Pacheco, a small agricultural community in Murcia, Spain.
Over the course of a week, hundreds of individuals, mostly young men, gathered from all over the country, taking to the streets at night to “hunt and purge” roughly one-third of the town’s population. They had been summoned through social media and Telegram group chats.
The trigger? One act of horrific violence and a flood of disinformation. On July 9, Domingo Tomás, a 68-year-old resident of Torre-Pacheco, was physically assaulted while walking his dog. He was beaten and thrown to the ground, a gratuitous act of violence with no clear motive: The man did not know his attackers, and nothing was stolen from him.
The notion that the attackers were of Maghrebi origin — a predominantly Muslim group of people facing religious discrimination in Spain — quickly spread on social media, given the high percentage of Maghrebi people within Torre-Pacheco’s population. But the Civil Guard, one of Spain’s national police forces, had not released any information about the alleged perpetrators or made any arrests. The rumors quickly spread that it was two or three people of Maghrebi origin who had wantonly beaten Tomás. Videos of the attack circulated. It wasn’t until later that the footage was proven to be months old and from a different region altogether, erroneously passed off as this crime.
But the fire was already ablaze, and men were in the streets.
Anti-immigrant sentiment conflagrated in group chats. The Spanish section of Deport Them Now, a Europe-wide network of far-right, anti-immigration groups, pinned a message to the top of its chat so it would be the first thing anyone saw upon joining: “Let’s go hunt. Everyone to Torre-Pacheco.”
Within hours of the attack, hundreds of activists from different regions of Spain piled into cars to “fight, trap, hang, behead” immigrants, as explicitly stated in the group chat, which has since been shut down by police. The chat’s leader was arrested a week later, accused of “instigating a ‘hunt’ for immigrants in Torre-Pacheco.” According to the Spanish Observatory of Racism and Xenophobia, 33,000 social media posts containing hate speech against immigrants were posted in a single day, on July 12.
For over a week, night after night, dozens roamed the streets of Torre-Pacheco, targeting people of foreign origin, including many second-generation immigrants born and raised in Spain. Residents, afraid to leave their homes, stuck to a self-imposed curfew of 8 p.m. From their windows, they saw their businesses vandalized and people hurt. On July 13, according to witnesses and local media, a group of 40 to 50 individuals, armed with bats, pepper spray and stones, stormed a kebab restaurant, shouting, “Moro, close up, no work today” (“Moro” is a colloquial, often derogatory term used in Spain to refer to people of North African or Muslim origin). They destroyed the business, causing thousands in damage, and forcing Hassan, the owner, to flee through the back door, running for his life.
The events in Torre-Pacheco, which lasted for more than a week, led to at least 14 arrests — among them the actual attackers of Domingo Tomás, three Moroccan immigrants who were not residents of the town — as well as 140 reports filed and the identification of 700 individuals by the police.
Several months later, however, tensions in Torre-Pacheco remain high. The violence may have stopped, but the community is still deeply divided. Abdelali Chergui, a local resident, says that in early September, a meeting was held with the mayor, the Moroccan consul in the Region of Murcia, and several representatives of the Islamic community to seek ways to improve coexistence in the town.
Beneath crystal chandeliers, the architects of a new “patriot” identity set out to redraw Europe’s political map.
While he won’t speak of the meeting, Chergui refuses to be presented as a representative of the Islamic community. “I am a representative of the people of Torre-Pacheco, of my neighbors,” he says. “I live in Spain and I defend this country; we are all equal.”
But, nothing feels equal right now in Chergui’s community.
“People are scared. I go out at night, and I see fear in their faces. It’s the elderly and the young who suffer the most.” Chergui says that many far-right groups “took advantage of the situation to stoke hatred against foreigners.” But what worries him most is school days for the children.
“It wasn’t only people from outside the town; there are public videos showing well-known local residents taking part in the hunt,” says Paulino Ros, a journalist, a sociology professor at the National University of Distance Education and a resident of the region. “The severity of the trauma depends on the color of your skin.” Ros, who runs the Islam in Murcia blog, has spent years researching the integration of immigrants belonging to a religious minority in southeastern Spain. “It isn’t accurate to say the town has returned to normal,” he explains. “A part of the community was attacked, and there are children who still don’t dare to leave their homes.”
Ros points out that many young people in the town feel they belong nowhere. They were born and raised in Spain, don’t speak Arabic, have never set foot in Morocco, yet they are still treated as foreigners. “If a young person is told every day, ‘Moro, go back to your country,’ it’s very difficult for them to integrate.”
When the events in Torre-Pacheco took place, the town’s mayor, Pedro Ángel Roca Tornel (a member of the People’s Party), said in an interview with Cadena SER, Spain’s leading radio station, that the town had seen an increase in crime linked to immigration. However, there is no data to support that claim. According to the National Statistics Institute, Spain has twice as many foreign nationals today than in 2005, while Ministry of the Interior data show the crime rate is lower.
The case of Torre-Pacheco sparked a wave of public support for immigrants among left-wing political parties. At the same time, far-right networks, not only in Spain but across the continent, watched the unrest and applauded it. A chasm was deepening.
Amid the back-and-forth of polarized politics now sweeping the world, mainstream conservative parties in Europe have watched their closest allies drift further toward the extremes. And as the edges of the spectrum pull away, the center itself begins to shift too. The question is: In which direction will centrists move — or be pulled? Harvard professor of political science Daniel Ziblatt notes in his theory of the conservative dilemma that center-right parties face a fundamental issue: Their ideological kinship with economic elites often clashes with the need to win broad democratic majorities, many of whom are living with the consequences of deepening inequality. To square the circle, they recast economic divides in cultural terms, focusing on issues such as immigration. But the far right pushes that rhetoric further, translating words into action, sometimes violent. That leaves conservatives in Europe at a crossroads: They may share elements of the far right’s agenda on immigration or fiscal policy, yet recoil from the violence it foments — and so does the broader public.
In this new political landscape, littered with hate speech and violent demonstrations, centrists have never felt further apart from the rest of their party.
Over the past 25 years, Europe’s political center has held. Since the 2008 financial crisis, two political blocs — Social Democrats on the center-left and Christian Democrats and Liberals on the center-right — have governed most countries. In Brussels, the de facto capital of the EU, centrist groups have also kept control of Parliament and the Commission. Yet their power is now under threat. They may be at the wheel, but they are increasingly navigating terrain shaped by extremism. Centrists now govern with thinner mandates, fragile coalitions and agendas that drift toward nationalist talking points.
The shocks of recent years — wars, a pandemic, technological disruption, waves of migration — have magnified the strain. Social media and alternative platforms (Telegram, X, WhatsApp) have given right-wing movements new channels to bypass traditional media and channel grievances about sovereignty, identity and immigration. Mainstream parties have scrambled to adjust. In Denmark, the left embraced tougher immigration laws; in France, President Emmanuel Macron pivoted to security-first rhetoric. In Brussels, centrist blocs cling to power by stitching together shifting majorities.
In this new political landscape, conservative centrists have never felt further apart from the rest of their party.
The results, country by country, have been stark. Since 2022, right-wing leaders won elections in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden. In France, Germany, Poland and the U.K., far-right parties are expanding their reach. Across Europe, the far right is no longer just setting its sights on power — it is reimagining the entire picture. What was once the center is shifting under voters’ feet, and forcing them to choose a side — the left or the right — rather than remain in the middle. The battle isn’t just for Torre-Pacheco. It’s the fight for Europe’s political soul.
But this is not merely a European story about shifting coalitions. It is part of a larger, global struggle over the future of pluralism and liberalism — the very ideals democracy was designed to serve. If the center cannot hold, the question is not just whether democracy survives, but whether the open, tolerant societies it underpins can endure.
A new European identity
On March 4, 1964, the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna welcomed its first guests with the sparkle of a city stepping into a new era. Rising right beside the Stadtpark, and facing the gilded statue of Johann Strauss, it was Austria’s largest hotel at the time — a gleaming newcomer meant to fill a gap left by the ghost of Hotel Métropole, once Vienna’s grandest. Built in 1873, it was seized by the Nazis in 1938 from its Jewish owners and turned into the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo. On March 12, 1945, in the war’s final weeks, Allied bombs struck the building. Its ruins were demolished in 1948.
Vienna’s skyline was left with a hole until the Intercontinental Hotel opened. It was the first in the country’s history to belong to an international chain, restoring a sense of cosmopolitan grandeur to the city. Sixty years later, within those very walls, a meeting would take place that marked another turning point in Europe’s political history.
On June 30, 2024, three of the most influential figures of nationalist and populist right-wing politics in Europe — Herbert Kickl, chairman of Austria’s Freedom Party, FPÖ; Viktor Orbán, chairman of Hungary’s Fidesz party and prime minister of Hungary; and Andrej Babiš, chairman of the Czech Republic’s ANO party — met with Harald Vilimsky, head of the FPÖ delegation in the European Parliament. They signed the Patriotic Manifesto for a European Future, laying the foundation for what would become the largest opposition party in the European Parliament: Patriots for Europe.
In the gilded rooms of a global hotel chain beneath crystal chandeliers, the architects of this new “patriot” identity were setting out to redraw Europe’s political map. The words “nation” and “national” appear 15 times in the manifesto. Its ideals are clear: identity, homeland, economic protectionism, tradition and a hard line against immigration. “Only through the victory and cooperation of patriotic and sovereigntist parties across the continent can we guarantee our children’s inheritance,” it reads.
A few years before the chandeliers were hung and the doors to the Intercontinental Hotel had anyone behind them, French diplomat Jean Monnet was charting a new course for the continent. He envisioned a European project that would begin by placing coal and steel — the backbone of industry and armament — under a shared authority, and from there weave the economic and monetary ties that might, in time, sustain a deeper political union: the European Union.
For 80 years, that was the essence of the European project: a union born from the ruins of war, meant to guarantee peace through democracy, the rule of law and shared prosperity. Two political blocs, Christian Democrats (center-right) and Social Democrats (center-left), built welfare states and an open market where goods, people, services and capital could move freely. The promise was simple: Together, Europe would be stronger.
Since this foundation, the European project has advanced in uneven, baby-like steps, the silver lining of each economic crisis being an opportunity — or a pretext — for a fresh layer of integration toward the initial goal.
Like the Covid-19 pandemic. Its intense and sudden economic uncertainty opened a door that had long seemed bolted shut: the creation of a transfer union. For years, Berlin had reassured its voters that German money would remain in Germany. But in the summer of 2020, Brussels agreed to mutualize debt and launch NextGenerationEU, a shared fund to help member states weather the economic storm.
In doing so, the Union crossed a quiet Rubicon. Commentators, searching for precedent, called it “Europe’s Hamiltonian moment,” in reference to Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 persuasion of the new federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts of the 13 states, binding them financially to the union and laying the foundations of the soon-to-be United States of America. Brussels took a step of similar ambition, pooling the debts of its member states to confront a common crisis and, in doing so, tightening the bonds of the European project. But amid consolidation, several voices emerged intent on halting the idea of a union, rallying instead around sovereignty, homeland and patriotism.
There was some tension. The budding EU built much of its postwar identity around social rights — what the European Commission called the “European way of life.” It rested on equality, freedom and welfare guarantees, such as free health care and public education, often highlighted in opposition to the American system. For decades, that promise of social protection became Europe’s distinctive marker, the glue holding together very different nations under a shared project. Now, that identity is under strain: Rising inequality and cultural backlash have chipped away at the consensus, opening space for movements that question the very foundations of the European project. America is facing the same tension. These world powers that built their economies and democracies in very different ways now find themselves desperately trying to hold on to both.
Crisis after crisis
The 2008 financial crash, the 2015 refugee crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the energy crisis of 2022, inflation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A series of crises that seemed like a chance for union integration simultaneously left a large population of Europeans feeling abandoned and distrustful of the system. Leveraging that distrust has been easy for right-wing extreme sentiment and euroskepticism (that is, the view that the European Union holds too much power over its member states and that nations should reclaim more control over their own laws, borders and economies). Brexit, for example, was the direct consequence of a polycrisis — a convergence of economic turmoil, nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, the grievances of those left behind by globalization, and Britain’s long-simmering, deep-rooted euroskepticism.
This spreading doubt severed the longstanding political loyalties of many Europeans, weakening the Social Democrat (center-left) and Christian Democrat and Liberal (center-right) voter bases. Together, these three parties have dominated European politics for decades, building welfare states and defending further EU integration. But Europe’s parliamentary systems are different from the U.S.; most are proportional, multiparty systems, not rigid two-party duopolies. That means new political forces can break through more easily, threatening the hegemony of the blocs. It also means coalition governments are the norm.
For years, this dynamic kept extremist parties isolated, since mainstream groups of different ideologies could band together to form “grand coalitions” and shut them out. The flip side, however, is that fragmentation weakens the traditional center, making governance more fragile. As doubt spread and loyalty to centrist parties frayed, the gaps widened, allowing extremist parties a way in. As the political noise amplified, more Europeans felt unheard.
This growing crisis of representation isn’t just a symptom of weakening traditional parties. It’s also a manifestation of growing dissatisfaction among the people of Europe, America and elsewhere around the world. It could be the end of the neoliberal order, an era of global capitalism, of relatively open borders that underwrote decades of prosperity.
“Scholars have identified inequality as contributing to the formation of a ‘reservoir of discontent’ among voters, which has recently achieved a critical mass and made the radical right an appealing choice for large segments of the electorate,” Martin Lukk, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, writes. “As the radical right has in many cases courted voters with similar messages for decades, inequality is seen as a key feature of the context that has recently made these appeals successful, evidenced by the dramatic successes of radical-right parties around the world and cases such as Trump and Brexit.” Lukk also points out that inequality on its own can suppress political participation among the segments of the population that right-wing groups are interested in. These voters are mobilized by tapping into the desire to assert in/out groups, and inequality creates the conditions for those feelings to flourish.
Many parties have learned to channel discontent, fear and anger into a discourse aimed at specific groups, with the “nation” cast as the unifying thread, in order to change policy or reshape a country.
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has become an increasingly xenophobic and Islamophobic, euroskeptic, ethnonationalist, far-right conservative party with identitarian leanings, close ties to Russia and China, anti-American rhetoric, and authoritarian traits. This year, it secured second place in federal elections, becoming Germany’s largest opposition party with just over 20 percent of the vote, and performed especially well in the east. All major parties, however, continue to uphold a cordon sanitaire against the AfD, refusing to enter coalitions or support legislation with the party at either the federal or state level.
In France, two far-right parties are expected to play a major role in the 2027 election: the National Rally, with Jordan Bardella as candidate after Marine Le Pen’s disqualification, and Reconquête, led by Éric Zemmour, known for his Islamophobic rhetoric and promotion of the “great replacement theory,” which claims that foreign Muslims will supplant the native French population.
Inequality is contributing to the “reservoir of discontent” among voters, which has recently achieved a critical mass and made the radical right an appealing choice.
The stakes are high. If both France and Germany, the EU’s two most influential members, were to elect right-wing, euroskeptic governments, the union could face a profound transformation. The shift has already begun, and this would tip the scales.
The 2024 European elections consolidated three distinct right-wing, euroskeptic groups in the European Parliament: Europe of Sovereign Nations (an alliance of extreme-right, nationalist parties including Germany’s AfD), Patriots for Europe (a far-right, populist coalition built around Austria’s FPÖ, Hungary’s Fidesz and the Czech Republic’s ANO), and the European Conservatives and Reformists (a more traditional conservative and euroskeptic alliance that includes Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party). Their growing numbers matter well beyond their member states. In Brussels, they now have the numbers to shape the balance of power within EU institutions and shift EU legislation.
Already, there has been a slowdown in certain elements of the Green Deal — the EU’s flagship climate and environmental agenda — in response to an erosion of support and to protests in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. These protests, which halted economies and literally highways across Europe, put an unlikely character at the center of global political debate: the farmer.
Farmers on the frontlines
Few groups illustrate Europe’s crisis of representation as vividly as farmers do. Across the continent, they have taken to the streets, convinced that no one is listening. “We protest because no one sits down with us to ask our opinion, and when they do, they ignore us,” says Andrés Góngora, a farmer and board member of the Coordinator of Professional Agrarian Organizations, which keeps an office in Brussels to lobby on agricultural policy. Their frustration has become fertile ground for new politics, fueled as much by fear as by anger.
Góngora says farmers feel “marginalized” by the system. “We are going through one of the worst moments in the history of agricultural policy. Decision-makers in Brussels have turned their backs on us and see agriculture only through the lens of the environment.”
Speaking with Góngora, it becomes clear that the problem is not just a clash between the productive model of agriculture and green policies, but, more so, a profound lack of communication.
José Manuel Roche, a farmer and the secretary of international relations at the Union of Small Farmers, agrees.
“I’ve always said that we farmers would be far worse off outside the European Union. But when commercial and environmental projects are pushed through without listening to us, it fuels deep discontent within the sector. It feeds euroskepticism.”
In several countries, farmers’ protests have been large, highly visible and at times disruptive, blocking highways and bringing major cities to a standstill. In the Netherlands, France and Germany, they have drawn tens of thousands of participants; in Poland and Spain, they have spread nationwide, halting major highways. In many of these cases, far-right parties and movements have encouraged the demonstrations, amplifying farmers’ grievances and folding them into a broader anti-EU narrative.
The protests, of course, are about much more than farming. They’re morphing into something larger, more combustible. Economic grievances become cultural grievances; calls for fairness harden into calls for nationalism; suspicion of outsiders turns into outright xenophobia. And from there, the slide is familiar: racism, the corrosion of democratic norms and, ultimately, the unraveling of liberal society itself.
These dynamics are not confined to Europe. They are seeping into the American psyche, too. In a nationally representative poll by Tufts University’s CIRCLE and Protect Democracy, nearly one-third of Americans ages 18 to 29 say they have little confidence in democracy, and are increasingly open to authoritarian alternatives.
But globally, there are voices that are trying to calm the rising tensions.
Joshua Steib, a 22-year-old climate advocate from Germany, recalls that he began climate activism at the age of 15. What started as a school project eventually became his life mission. He served as an EU Young Energy Ambassador and has been a delegate at more than five United Nations conferences.
“Many people think of the EU as a technocratic body that harms their way of life, when in reality most of the EU’s climate-
related decisions are tied to subsidies and incentives for economies and businesses,” he says. “This agenda is being instrumentalized by certain parties and conservative associations to create a mainstream narrative about climate action in the EU that is completely false.”
In his view, the EU needs to find a way to rewrite that story. “People get angry because they believe certain climate measures will take something away from them … that’s a sentiment quite widespread in the EU. That’s scary. Fear of change is fundamental to human psychology,” he says.
But rather than working to address specific concerns within the public, experts note that political parties are instead using those concerns to reshape democracy. By some definitions, this is a textbook case of autocratization.
According to the 2025 Varieties of Democracy report, Slovakia’s liberal democracy score has plummeted in just two years. The country is now “deeply polarized” and “only a thin margin away from the autocratization threshold.” In Hungary, it began quietly, with just a few legislative changes. Then, the government gradually undermined judicial independence by appointing loyalist judges.
When Viktor Orbán began his third term as prime minister in 2018, he told Parliament: “The age of liberal democracy is at an end.” Except, this time, there were no tanks in the streets, no curfews announced over loudspeakers — only laws rushed through in late-night sessions, and critical voices pushed aside.
Central European University, for instance, was forced to leave Budapest and relocate to Vienna. The school’s exodus echoes similar tensions across the Atlantic, where traditional universities and Ivy League institutions have been rebranded as adversaries of the government, instead of institutions of educational ideals and liberty.
“This is not just a way to suppress dissent,” says Dimitry Kochenov, the head of Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute. “It was precisely the image of excellence in the social sciences, of an open society, that threatened (Orban.) It was absolutely impossible for the government to tolerate the school. … Because in order to be world-class, you need to think a little bit.”
The Central European University was founded by Hungarian American billionaire George Soros in 1991. “The mission of the university was about building liberal, pluralist democracies around the world,” says Kochenov, who was one of the last to stay when Orbán expelled the university, and now commutes to Vienna to teach. “When Orbán decided that Hungary would be an ‘illiberal democracy,’ the government’s official line became incompatible with what CEU stands for.”
Aside from education, Orbán has also targeted religious freedom. His “church law,” for instance, stripped hundreds of religious organizations of their official status. In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the law violated the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of association.
As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn in “How Democracies Die,” the end comes “at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”
The roots of rage
In his New York Times article, “Why My Father Votes for Le Pen,” French writer Édouard Louis recalls that when he emailed the manuscript of his novel “The End of Eddy” to a major Paris publisher, the editor replied that they couldn’t publish it because the poverty he described “hadn’t existed in more than a century.” But it had. And its victims were voting for Marine Le Pen. “Today, writers, journalists, and liberals bear the weight of responsibility for the future,” Louis writes. “To persuade my family not to vote for Marine Le Pen, it’s not enough to show that she is racist and dangerous. … We have to fight for the powerless — people like my father.”
Why are people voting for extreme parties? Sociologists and political scientists don’t seem to agree, but many blame the economy.
As Thomas Piketty argued in his bestseller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” growing inequality is a key driver. Yet the problem is not only shrinking purchasing power, unemployment or inflation. It is also the fear of losing social standing. This fear helps explain why populist parties across Europe attract not only those who have already been hit hard by economic crises but also people who fear they could be next.
Research has long noted the gap between how voters see their own lives and how they judge the nation as a whole. Ivan Tubio, a political scientist and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, argues that while the roots of Europe’s far-right surge are varied, certain patterns recur across democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. “Job insecurity is a recurrent factor,” he says, “but it accounts for less than a quarter of the far-right electorate, which shows why the ‘economic losers’ explanation is too limited.” More often, the common threads are lower levels of education and a simmering hostility toward immigration, forces that cut across borders and repeatedly push politics toward the extremes.
Immigration has been a central theme in far-right speech across Europe, as seen in events such as those in Torre-Pacheco and in the electoral success of leaders like Meloni in Italy, whose 2022 campaign for prime minister placed immigration at its core. Other recurring themes include concerns over sovereignty, religion, traditional values, and the political mobilization of women and minorities.
Other experts, however, blame the system.
Iago Moreno, a sociologist and an expert on disinformation campaigns, argues that the far right’s success is rooted in massive disinformation campaigns. “There are structures that connect the organizers of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol with far-right groups in Europe and, for example, with the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina,” he says. “That goes beyond sharing a common ideology. They come together in international forums and pursue financial and political goals through think tanks that keep them connected.”
Whether it’s responding to the will of voters, economic hardship, sociocultural grievances or the pull of disinformation campaigns, a growing share of voters is drifting away from the center — and time to figure out the “why” is running out. The question now, according to Moreno, is how to respond.
The global political dilemma
Conservatives around the world are in a dilemma. So are progressives.
The progressive dilemma poses the fundamental tension between inclusive welfare policies on the one hand and the consequences of immigration on the other. A similar strain is evident in the conservative predicament: Center-right political parties often find themselves torn between their alignment with economic elites and the need to win over broad majorities in democratic elections.
But if the politics of each ideal are facing dilemmas, then the biggest of all is being faced by voters.
Javier Padilla, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Politics at the City University of New York, explains that far-right voters are deeply dissatisfied with how democracy works and feel poorly represented. “This is structural, not circumstantial,” Padilla says. “It has less to do with the policies of any given moment and more to do with how they perceive the world.” He notes that this dissatisfaction is particularly pronounced among young male voters, who tend to have especially low levels of trust in the democratic system.
Whether it’s economic hardship or sociocultural grievances, a growing share of voters is drifting away from the center — and time to figure out the “why” is running out.
What remains of center-right parties faces a difficult strategic choice in responding to far-right movements. According to Padilla, they can either ostracize these parties, keeping a clear distance, or accommodate some of their positions to try to win over their voters.
Neither strategy is without risk. Padilla warns that even if a far-right party disappears, another is likely to take its place. On the other hand, when mainstream parties adopt the far right’s rhetoric, they make its logic part of the mainstream, many voters feel they only have one choice, and the consequences are felt long after the crowds have gone home.
In Torre-Pacheco, as local Paulino Ros recounts, the violence dissipated, but its shadow has not. The streets may be quiet now, but the fear, the suspicion and the politics that fed them are loud.
This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.