Will Spain's PP protect foreigners' rights if they get into power?

Spanish pollsters have long predicted that ruling Socialist (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will lose the next election.

Whether it be the corruption scandals surrounding Sánchez, his government's inability to tackle Spain's housing crisis, or simply fatigue among the electorate, it seems that the Spanish right will be returning to power by 2024.

A change of government would also likely mean a change of approach on immigration. One of the key dividing lines between left and right in Spain in recent years has been immigration, like it has around much of Europe. As such, many foreigners in Spain are wondering what exactly a Partido Popular (PP) government would mean for them.

READ ALSO: Seven key points to understand Spain's new immigration law

Though it's difficult to predict policies ahead of time, we do have some evidence to go off and the answer seems to depend where you come from and what type of foreigner you are.

Led by Sánchez, the Spanish left makes the case for immigration, arguing it stimulates the economy and will become more necessary in coming years, whereas the Spanish right has taken on increasingly hardline positions and focuses much more on the sociocultural consequences of immigration such as religion, social integration and law and order.

The debate has in 2025 become increasingly extreme and polarised, such as the disturbances in small town Murcia last summer.

With Sánchez likely to lose the next election, the PP will 'win' and leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo will become the next Prime Minister. However, polling suggests it will almost certainly need to form a coalition with the far-right Vox, something it has already done on the regional level around Spain.

This will impact PP policy in terms of immigration. This year the PP has moved rightward and taken a more hardline stance to try and avoid being outflanked by Vox. The far-right party over the summer called for the deportation of up to 8 million migrants, including those born in Spain.

Spain's Immigration Minister Elma Saiz recently attacked the PP and Vox for "going hand in hand" on migration policy and for voting against the regularisation of migrants who have lived in Spain for years.

This will likely become a common attack line from the left because Vox's rise has come largely at the expense of PP. Data shows that the far-right party has now risen above 17 percent in the polls, taking almost a million votes away from the PP, according to polling for El País.

We can therefore expect the PP to ratchet up the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and some kind of right-wing bloc taking over Spain's immigration system in the coming years.

Where does the PP stand on immigration?

But what does that actually mean in practical terms? The truth is, it can be difficult to identify clear PP policy positions beyond simply being anti-Sánchez. However, we can take a look at the party's current rhetoric and record in the past to give us an idea.

We can almost say for sure that the PP will take a firm, no-tolerance approach to illegal immigration, though it's unlikely the top brass would entertain any Vox's far-right ideas about second and third-generation migrants.

So, what about legal migrants? When the Sánchez government controversially scrapped the Golden Visa scheme in 2024, the PP opposed the move and described it as a "smokescreen". It should be noted that it was the PP who created the Golden Visa, welcoming wealthy foreigners into the country and essentially handing out residency in return for investment.

Similarly, the party has no issue with uber-wealthy Latino migrants coming to Madrid and buying up property in the well-to-do Salamanca quarter in recent years. The PP has also rejected proposals to ban foreigners from buying property in overly-saturated markets such as the Balearic and Canary Islands.

Clearly, rich foreigners are no problem for Feijóo and his party.

However, the centre-right party has on both the regional and national level tried to create more obstacles to certain types of immigration, both legal and illegal. The Basque PP, for example, has argued that "receiving welfare benefits cannot in itself generate the right to reside legally in Spain," an attempt to further complicate the residency process for migrants in irregular situations.

A recent policy document from PP argued for separating registration in Spain (whether by the empadronamiento or other means) from access to non-contributory state benefits for migrants in an irregular situation. It also claimed that the use of the burqa or the niqab is "a symbolic and practical denial of women's freedom", again giving oxygen to long-established Vox policies.

In short, we can conclude that a PP government will likely be hardline against some immigrants and more welcoming of others. Much of this will come down to the legal versus illegal migration debate, though some of it's also what the Spanish right would call 'culture'.

In the past the party has wilfully welcomed wealthy foreigners, even when to the detriment of Spaniards strength in the property market, and often but not always from white western countries, while it has in recent months and years escalated its anti-immigrant rhetoric against asylum seekers and refugees, and largely left unchallenged the far-right's attacks on legal migrants (even second and third-generation) from countries like Morocco and Algeria.

Will Spain's PP protect foreigners' rights if they get into power?

Judging by the hardening rhetoric, the likelihood that the PP will need Vox to form a government, and the party's past policies towards migrants, it seems likely that the PP will continue supporting the rights of wealthy western foreigners but could take a stricter position on illegal immigration, citizenship, and social integration to those coming from Africa.