Spanish town ordered to scrap religious festivals ban mainly impacting Muslims

The Guardian

2 days ago

Spain's central government has ordered officials in a Spanish town to scrap a ban on religious gatherings in public sports centres, describing it as a 'discriminatory' measure that breaches the right to religious freedom as it will mainly impact Muslims.
'There can be no half-measures when it comes to intolerance,' Ángel Víctor Torres, the minister for territorial policy, wrote on social media on Monday. Rightwing opposition parties, he added, 'cannot decide who has freedom of worship and who does not'.
Last week, it emerged that the conservative-led council in Jumilla, a town of about 27,000 residents in the region of Murcia, had backed the ban. As its Muslim residents had for years used the facilities to come together to mark Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the motion was widely seen as targeting the town's estimated 1,500 Muslims.
The proposal was initially put forward by the far-right Vox party, which called for an outright ban on public celebrations such as Eid al-Adha.
Vox's hardline motion was watered down and subsequently backed by the People's party (PP), which removed the explicit reference to Eid al-Adha and instead stipulated that municipal sports facilities could no longer be used for 'cultural, social or religious activities foreign to the city council'. Vox had demanded the measure in exchange for backing the budget put forward by the town's PP mayor.
As the far right celebrated what it described as the 'first measure' to ban Islamic festivals in Spain's public spaces, the outcry was swift. The head of a prominent Muslim association in Spain described the ban as 'institutionalised Islamophobia', while the country's migration minister called it 'shameful'.
In Jumilla, the PP defended the motion, arguing that it did not single out any religion or belief and highlighted that 72 nationalities coexisted in the town without any issue. The local mayor, Seve González, told El País the council was aiming to 'promote cultural campaigns' that defended 'our identity' and protected the 'values and religious expressions of our country'.
In Madrid, the Socialist-led central government seized on the measure, portraying the PP as beholden to the far right, forcing the party to compromise with Vox while also drifting further to the right in order to compete for votes.
Spain's migration minister, Elma Saiz, said those who paid the price would be citizens who had spent decades peacefully living in Jumilla and had helped to sustain a local economy centred on vineyards and crops such as olives and almonds.
She told the broadcaster Antena 3: 'Foreigners make up 20% of those who contribute to social security in Jumilla. These towns would collapse without them.'
Saiz brushed off the claim that the ban was aimed at protecting Spanish identity, citing the country's history as a Muslim stronghold. 'To me, that seems utterly ignorant,' she said. 'It overlooks that we would not be the country we are today if we could not appreciate the contribution of Muslim culture to our language, our works of art, advances in architecture and civil engineering.'
Among the chorus of voices c ondemning the ban was the Catholic church, which described it as a form of discrimination that was incompatible with the right to religious freedom, while the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain told news agency Europa Press that the measure was a 'serious democratic setback'.
The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, said he was 'perplexed' by the stance of the Catholic church. Speaking to a far-right YouTube channel, he suggested the church's view could be linked to its reliance on public funding or to clergy abuse scandals that he claimed have 'absolutely muzzled' it.
On Monday, a central government representative said the council in Jumilla had a month to formally respond to Madrid's request. If it failed to respond, the central government would explore what other legal options are available, the spokesperson added.
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The measure came weeks after unrest gripped Torre-Pacheco, about 60 miles (100km) from Jumilla, with baton-wielding groups taking to the streets to 'hunt' people with foreign origins after an assault on an older person.
In the lead-up to the unrest, after the pensioner told local media he believed his attacker had been of north African origin, racist messaging on social media rocketed by 1,500%, according to tracking by the central government.
The events in Jumilla and Torre-Pacheco hinted at how the far right had started down a path that put all of Spain in danger, said Mounir Benjelloun Andaloussi Azhari, the president of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities.
'The goal of all this – let's not forget – is so that the far right can win votes,' he told the news site Eldiario.es. 'And if they need to criminalise an entire population to do so, if they have to generate hatred, if they have to lie and make coexistence impossible, if they have to say this is an 'invasion' they will do it.'
He had lived in Spain for 30 years, but said it was the first time he – along with many others – had felt persecuted: 'All for a handful of votes. At the expense of citizens' fear, at the expense of Spain's image around the world, and at the expense of betraying those who once proposed a stable model for Spain that guaranteed a series of rights that they now want to do away with.'