- Migrant numbers do not explain it: Foreign residents are about eight per cent of the population in Saxony-Anhalt and close to a third in El Ejido, and strong nativist mobilisation appears at both levels.
- Support crosses the national divide: Catalonia’s Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió estimates that roughly 23 per cent of Vox sympathisers and 28 per cent of Junts sympathisers are moving to Aliança.
- The nation is interchangeable: Vox and Aliança Catalana sit in the same chamber on mutually annihilating national projects, and both rest on the same nativist core.
- Restriction may not drain the reservoir: If very different grievances can accept the same culprit, reducing migration does not necessarily remove the explanatory target.
- The wrong variable held constant: What survives both substitutions is the arrangement itself — a constructed native in-group and an available outsider.
"Fear sells better than data." A Catalan friend put it to me in a message this week, as the Saxony-Anhalt result came in. The German numbers make his case, and then the Spanish ones complicate it in a way that matters more.
On Sunday the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) took 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, its strongest result in any German state election. It won 39 of 83 seats, three short of an absolute majority. The Christian Democrats, who had held the minister-presidency since 2002, fell to 17.2 per cent and 15 seats, against 37.1 five years ago, when the AfD had 20.8. Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote on 20 September.
The reading that followed was familiar within hours. Saxony-Anhalt has one of the lowest shares of foreign residents in Germany. The far-right vote is strongest where there is least contact with migrants. Therefore the vote is not really about migration; it is about decline, depopulation, and the search for someone to blame.
The observation is accurate and it has been made for a decade. The inference drawn from it is another matter — the demographic version of the argument, in which scarcity of migrants produces the fear, and the fear would dissolve on acquaintance. The objection to that is not theoretical. It is that Spain runs the relationship in the opposite direction and arrives at the same politics.
Substitution one: change the outsider
El Ejido, in the province of Almería, has some 90,600 inhabitants, of whom roughly 32 per cent are registered foreign residents — among the highest proportions anywhere in Spain. Nearly two-thirds are Moroccan. They were drawn by the greenhouse agriculture that made the comarca one of Europe’s largest producers of fruit and vegetables. Most cannot vote. In the Andalusian election in May, Vox took 31.4 per cent there, behind the People’s Party on 41.6 but more than double its regional score of 13.8.
None of this is a discovery. An El País analysis of more than 30,000 polling districts after 2019 already found a positive association between migrant presence and the Vox vote, with El Ejido emblematic. Nor does the mirror-image story hold: work in the European Journal of Political Research finds that depopulation does not by itself raise the radical-right vote in Spain.
Neither finding is striking on its own. Put beside each other they are. In Saxony-Anhalt foreign residents are about eight per cent of the population on the official count, low by German standards. In El Ejido they are close to a third, daily and structurally present. Strong nativist mobilisation appears at both levels, which is enough to say that the number of outsiders does not explain it on its own. And the grievances underneath are genuinely different — abandonment in one place, proximity and competition in the other. They resolve onto an identical target. The target is not derived from the grievance. It is supplied to it.
Substitution two: change the insider
If the first comparison varies the outsider, Catalonia varies the other term — the insider. It is not an experiment; the voters are not a treatment and a control group. It is one of the rare settings in Europe where two radical-right parties compete with incompatible ideas of who the native is.
Vox entered the Catalan parliament in 2021 on a platform of Spanish nationalism committed to the unity of the state. In 2024 it was joined by Aliança Catalana, led by Sílvia Orriols, mayor of Ripoll, which took two of 135 seats on a pro-independence platform. On the question that has organised Catalan politics for 15 years the two are not merely opponents but mutually annihilating.
That they nonetheless share a nativist core is established rather than novel: it is the finding, and nearly the title, of Javier Martínez-Cantó and Julià Tudó-Cisquella’s study in Regional and Federal Studies. Carles Ferreira has since described a compatible dual logic of exclusion. The two electorates resemble each other socioeconomically and share concerns about immigration; what primarily sorts a voter between the two is national attachment. The Generalitat’s Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió finds the same asymmetry: housing leads among PSC, ERC, Junts, Comuns, and CUP sympathisers and insecurity among those of the People’s Party, while immigration leads among Aliança sympathisers at 31 per cent and Vox sympathisers at 38.
The detail that carries the argument is the direction of movement. Aliança is drawing from both hosts at once. The Centre’s transfer model estimates that roughly 28 per cent of Junts sympathisers and 23 per cent of Vox sympathisers move to it. The first flow shows nativism capturing a mainstream Catalan-nationalist party; the second crosses the Spanish–Catalan national divide altogether. Whatever Aliança is offering travels under rival national projects at the same time.
Set the two comparisons beside each other. In the first, the presence of the outsider changes completely and the nativist result survives. In the second, what changes is the identity of the insider — Spain in one party, an independent Catalonia in the other, in the same chamber, in the same month — and the vote holds up under both.
What does not vary is the arrangement itself: a constructed native in-group and an available outsider. Cas Mudde’s standard account treats nativism as nationalism combined with xenophobia, and it plainly requires some construction of a nation. The point is not that nativism can do without a nation. It is that it does not require a particular one, or a stable one. That the national host can change is not itself new: the Lega’s migration from northern Italian regionalism to Italian nationalism is the obvious precedent. But that was one organisation changing host over time. Catalonia shows two incompatible hosts coexisting in a single electoral arena, with measurable movement of support across the divide between them.
Which suggests that when we treat either migration levels or a specific nationalism as the principal explanation, we may be holding the wrong variable constant.
Since 2015 the mainstream European strategy has been to tighten migration policy to drain the reservoir of far-right support. Saxony-Anhalt alone cannot show that this has failed; one election cannot carry that weight.
But the logic of the two substitutions supports a weaker claim that is still uncomfortable. If the outsider functioned simply as an objective source of grievance, reducing the phenomenon should at least predictably reduce the mobilisation. If instead very different grievances can accept the same culprit, then a policy that reduces migration does not necessarily remove the explanatory target. It may entrench it. When parties elected to contain the far right adopt its premise – that migration is the problem to be solved – they confirm its choice of culprit in their own voice, and with the authority of office behind it.
The Catalan case constrains the alternative strategy as well. Junts is not losing voters to Aliança because it was insufficiently nationalist; it is losing them, as Vox is, because a competitor arrived offering a nation with an enemy attached, and the enemy has proved the more portable half of the offer.
Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote on 20 September. The useful question afterwards will not be how many migrants live there. It will be what else has gone wrong locally, and who has arrived to name a culprit.
