MADRID — This summer’s wave of record-breaking wildfires has put Spain’s ability to manage crises under scrutiny while unleashing a fierce political spat and providing electoral ammunition to a surging radical right.
Wildfires have burned more than 400,000 hectares in Spain this year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System, making this the worst fire summer for three decades.
The response to the blazes has been at the center of a dispute between the tenuous central government, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), and the opposition conservative People’s Party (PP). While the Socialists remain in charge of federal ministries and agencies, the PP governs the three regions worst hit: Galicia, Castilla y León and Extremadura.
Transport Minister Óscar Puente described the PP president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, as “a disgrace” for having been on vacation when the fires began to devastate his region. In the ensuing quarrel, the PP called Virginia Barcones, head of the state civil protection agency, a “pyromaniac” and a “hooligan.”
Amid the name-calling by Spain’s two centrist parties, the far-right Vox — the third-largest party in the parliament — has benefited the most, presenting the wildfires as the result of a morally bankrupt political system.
“Everything is burning except the only thing that should burn: a corrupt system that conspires against the Spanish people,” said Vox leader Santiago Abascal as the fires raged in mid-August.
Establishment parties failing
Sánchez has emphasized that the fires are rooted in climate change and has called for a cross-party agreement to tackle what he calls a “climate emergency” in Spain.
Vox, by contrast, has used the wildfires to promote its own platform based on denial of climate change, describing the government’s policies as “climate terrorism.” It blames a lack of attention to vulnerable rural areas on the government’s green policies and adherence to the United Nation’s sustainable development goals.
Vox claims that installing renewable energy infrastructure on rural land instead of practicing traditional farming increases the likelihood of fires. It also wants to centralize the government, making Madrid — rather than the country’s regions — solely responsible for coordinating firefighting.
The PP, which has also at times embraced climate change denial but is wary of being too closely associated with Vox, dismissed Sánchez’s calls for a political pact, calling them “a smokescreen” to distract from his own woes.
Vox, meanwhile, paints the problem as a failing of both establishment parties.
“The bi-party system has stripped clean Spain … [and] endless forests … burn while the PP and Socialist Workers’ Party argue over responsibility, rules and budgets,” wrote party spokesperson Jorge Buxadé on the right-wing OkDiario news site Aug. 24. His party colleague, Hermann Tertsch, even peddled the theory that the central government had deliberately started the fires as a distraction from its own problems.
Those difficulties include the instability of the Sánchez administration, which governs with a razor-thin parliamentary majority and has been tested in recent months by a series of corruption probes.
“There’s mileage in that rhetoric for the far right, making the government out to be illegitimate, incapable — that all the country’s problems have the same root cause, which is the government,” said Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos.
He said that Vox’s ability to distance itself from the traditional parties and their bickering helps broaden its appeal.
“Before, Vox was a party for the middle and upper-middle classes, but more recently it’s winning support among lower-income groups,” he said. “And it’s managing to secure support among rural, sparsely populated areas; the small towns, where people have low incomes.”
Disasters fuel Vox’s upswing
The wildfires are the latest in a series of national crises that have roiled the country’s toxic politics.
In October 2024, flash floods in eastern Spain killed more than 220 people, leading to an angry row between the PP and PSOE. The dispute went as far as Brussels when the conservatives unsuccessfully tried to block the appointment of former Socialist minister Teresa Ribera as European commissioner.
In April, a blackout — whose cause has still not been fully explained — left the country without electricity for several hours, generating outlandish conspiracy theories and another political squabble.
Vox has cast these crises as evidence of a failing state, even linking them to immigration and citing what some have criticized as the slow supply of aid in response to the eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands in 2021.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a volcano, a pandemic, a migrant invasion, a flood, a blackout — or now, wildfires,” Vox leader Abascal said. “The state has been collapsed and occupied by a corrupt mafia at the service of Pedro Sánchez.”
Indeed, support for Vox was already rising before the fires. A July poll by the CIS national research agency had the party on 19 percent, closing the gap on the two leading parties, both at 27 percent (although other polling firms put the PSOE firmly in second place). The far-right party’s support has risen particularly among rural workers, many of whom have been directly affected by the fires.
Vox seems to be poaching voters from the PP rather than the PSOE. However, as the summer fires die down, the government will once again be forced to face the corruption scandal that exploded this past spring. A massive kickback scheme, which implicates PSOE heavyweights, remains “heavy enough to bring down the government,” according to Camas.
Persuading his broad parliamentary alliance to approve a new budget for 2026 — no easy task — appears to be Sánchez’s best hope of surviving the coming months.
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