Nazi Salutes in Madrid: How Anti-Migrant Rage Reboots the Oldest Hatred

On Wednesday, in the heart of Madrid, between 60 and 70 activists from Núcleo Nacional raised their arms in a Nazi salute and sang "Cara al Sol," the 1935 fascist anthem that became the emblem of the Franco regime. The scene unfolded in front of the Congress, on the sidelines of massive demonstrations — around 50,000 people according to the government — called by the Popular Party and Vox after more than 72,000 Moroccan migrants arrived in Ceuta in late July, a crossing that cost at least 100 lives.

Asked about it, the group's spokesman offered the classic defense: it wasn't a Nazi salute but an "Iberian or Roman salute" that "represents our ancestors." Historians are unequivocal: no evidence links this gesture to ancient Rome. It was an invention of Italian fascism in the 1920s, adopted by Franco in 1937 — then abandoned on his orders in 1945, when the Axis lost. Even the Caudillo knew what that outstretched arm meant.

But the real story isn't the gesture. It's the group's ideology, documented by the Observatory of Antisemitism in Spain. Núcleo Nacional, founded in 2024, roughly 2,000 members strong and already converted into a political party under the name Noviembre Nacional, doesn't stop at denouncing immigration. In a 2024 statement, it claims that "it is Israel that finances the Maghrebi invasion to which all of Europe is subjected." On its social media, it says it is targeted by "the Judeo-Zionist lobby in Spain" and accuses "the Judeo-American financial elite" of "buying up Spain at bargain prices." Its leaders deny the Holocaust.

Let's pause on this mechanism, because it is the real news here. There isn't a single Jew in the Ceuta story these activists tell. The conflict pits Spain against Morocco, migrants against a left-wing government. And yet, spontaneously, irresistibly, the narrative climbs back toward the Jew: he's the one financing, the one manipulating, the one "invading" by proxy. It's the "Great Replacement" theory in its original version — the one where the replacer-in-chief always wears the same face.

For Spain's Jewish communities, which recorded 221 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the lesson is bitter but valuable: antisemitism doesn't need us to thrive, it only needs a crisis. And it now comes from both ends at once — from a far left that has turned denouncing Israel into a foreign policy, and from a far right that accuses Israel of flooding Europe.

Here is the angle no one highlights: these two discourses, theoretically enemies, say exactly the same thing. The Jew as an occult power, sometimes a "colonizer" in Gaza, sometimes the "financier of the invasion" in Ceuta. The day these two narratives merge in the street — and Madrid just staged the dress rehearsal — Europe's Jews will find themselves alone in the middle. All the more reason to rely on our own clear-sightedness, and to name it without flinching.