Vox leader Santiago Abascal blames Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez for wildfires, ties disasters to ‘corruption, fanaticism, and mafia’

The video message

Santiago Abascal, leader of the right-wing Vox party, published a video on social media platform X on Saturday 25 July in which he harshly criticised the government’s handling of the wildfires that have struck central Spain. Speaking as blazes burned in parts of Madrid, Ávila, and Toledo, Abascal accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his administration of bearing direct responsibility for what he called repeated disasters.

Spain is burning, but we’ve also had to say lately, Spain is flooding, Spain is going dark.

The video was the latest salvo in a long-running political conflict, arriving while emergency crews continued their work against the fires.

Accusations of corruption, fanaticism, and mafia

Abascal explicitly linked the wildfires and other recent events to three things he said defined the government’s approach: corruption, what he called “climate fanaticism”, and behaviour he described as mafia-like. He argued that the disasters were not mere accidents.

The repeated disasters in Spain are not only accidents and fate; they are directly related to corruption, to fanaticism, and to the mafia.

He defined corruption as “third-world management”, citing the railway accident at Adamuz in Córdoba as an example. The “climate fanaticism” label, he said, applies to environmental policies that prevent proper prevention measures in wildfires, the DANA flood episodes, and the previous year’s power blackout, turning into “an excuse not to invest in response resources”. The third element, which he called mafia, was the claim that the government uses disasters to politically wear down non-aligned regional administrations and to hide its own responsibilities and alleged misdeeds.

The Nero comparison

Abascal closed the video by likening Pedro Sánchez to the Roman emperor Nero, who legend says played the lyre while Rome burned.

This is the Spain of Sánchez, that of Nero, who soon will recommend music to us on his social networks.

The line drew a direct parallel between what Abascal presents as official indifference to national crises and the image of a ruler detached from suffering. It echoed a rhetorical theme Vox has used before to accuse the prime minister of prioritising public relations over problem-solving.

Context of the wildfires

The message comes as firefighting operations are under way in several provinces of central Spain. The regional governments of Madrid, Castile and León (Ávila), and Castilla-La Mancha (Toledo) are managing the response. Temperatures across the Iberian Peninsula have been above seasonal norms, and wildfire risk has been elevated for several days. Abascal’s video makes no reference to on-the-ground firefighting efforts or to the specific causes of the current blazes; instead it uses the fires as a platform to indict the national government’s entire crisis-management record.

Political response

No immediate reply from the Sánchez government was reported in the articles. The attack follows a pattern of Vox linking domestic emergencies to what Abascal calls systemic decay under the Socialist-led coalition. The video, shared on what was until recently known as Twitter, is designed for wide digital dissemination. It frames the summer fires not as isolated natural phenomena but as part of a broader narrative of state failure that Vox intends to keep in public view.