The largest wildfire in Spanish history risks becoming a political liability for the center-right People’s Party ahead of a pivotal election next year.
Over the past five days, more than 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes as massive blazes have torn across the regions of Madrid, Ávila, Toledo and Castellón. With temperatures set to push toward almost 40 degrees Celsius, the prognosis for even greater devastation later this week is grim.
While the central government has stepped in to oversee this national crisis, regional authorities have legal responsibility for many of the front-line sectors at the heart of the emergency such as the rescue services and forest management. The center-right PP, which controls 11 out of the country’s 17 regions, is now facing political blowback over perceived strategic failings.
At a national level, the PP is still topping the polls and is on track to take power in 2027, profiting from the web of corruption scandals ensnaring Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s ruling Socialist Party.
But the fires threaten to expose vulnerabilities. The conservatives are not only being criticized for failing to invest in firefighters, but also risk looking out of step with the severity of the challenge posed by climate change, in part thanks to regional alliances with the far-right Vox party that are steering the PP toward increasingly anti-ecological positions.
Madrid Regional President Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a conservative heavyweight, has felt the sting of public anger over her political priorities. On Sunday, she said she’d come under fire from constituents accusing her of prioritizing investment in fighting bulls — a vote winner with a right-wing base — rather than firefighters.
“In two or three municipalities, they were talking about bullfighters,” a palpably irritated Ayuso complained. “What do bullfighters have to do with all this?”
The populist Madrid president accused her political opponents of stirring up grievances to “divide” her constituents, adding that the bullfighting sector had been especially impacted by the wildfires. “We must remember that they are the first ones who have lost livestock and land,” she added.
But political opponents like Manuela Bergerot, spokesperson for the left-wing Más Madrid party, argued that once the fires are extinguished, it would be time to probe “the precarious situation of firefighters, cuts in prevention and climate change denial.”
Ayuso’s critics contrast those alleged failings with her administration’s willingness to subsidize bullfighting, on which the Madrid region is set to spend a record €7.2 million this year.
Regional responsibilities
Jordi Vendrell, director of the Pau Costa Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on wildfire management, explained that regional administrations had a legal responsibility for disaster prevention and crisis management.
“Spain is a decentralized country, and regional governments have jurisdiction over forest management and firefighting,” he said. “The central government provides a common framework through the forestry act, but it’s the regions that decide how forests and other landscapes are managed and which firefighting strategies to pursue.”
That responsibility is under increased scrutiny thanks to the governance pacts that the PP signed with the far-right Vox in regions such as Valencia, Aragón and Andalusia. In exchange for power, conservative regional leaders have been obliged to reject the EU’s Green Deal and adopt rhetoric questioning the extent to which human activity is driving climate change.
Those positions have increasingly put the PP at odds with public opinion. Spaniards consistently rank among the Europeans most concerned about climate change and among the strongest supporters of government action to tackle it, according to successive Eurobarometer surveys. And the disconnect has become a recurring political liability whenever Spain is struck by climate-related disasters, ranging from the deadly floods that killed 237 people in Valencia in 2024 to this summer’s devastating wildfires.
“The deals with Vox are obviously uncomfortable for the PP in these situations,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University. “But we also have to distinguish between rhetoric and public policy: These agreements haven’t resulted in significant policy changes.”
Vendrell said conservative-led regional administrations were hardly the only ones struggling to deal with wildfires. Across Spain, he said, adapting forest management and emergency planning to a rapidly changing climate requires sustained investments and structural reforms on a scale that few administrations have been willing to undertake.
“The climate denial positions are absurd, because they’re attempting to deny the obvious,” he added. “In addition to the plethora of scientific evidence, you can’t really pretend that we aren’t seeing longer and more intense periods where there’s an extreme risk of fire. Ignoring it is just attempting to move forward with a blindfold on.”
Uncertain consequences
Amid the current crisis, the PP has sought to redirect the debate toward broader structural problems, particularly the depopulation of rural Spain and the abandonment of agricultural land, both of which contribute to the spread of increasingly destructive wildfires.
Ester Muñoz, the PP parliamentary spokesperson, also played down the need to address the root causes of destructive climate change.
“Climate change is something that has occurred throughout the history of humanity and the Earth,” she told EsRadio on Monday. “The point is to ask how we as human beings act in the face of these changes.”
The conservatives have also tried to blame the flawed regional response on insufficient funding from Spain’s central government. The PP’s rural policy coordinator, MEP Carmen Crespo, on Monday accused Sánchez’s government of prioritizing its “ideology” over the needs of rural areas, and of failing to allocate sufficient EU cash to fire prevention.
Socialist Party spokesperson Montse Mínguez rejected the allegations of insufficient resources, saying that “instead of complaining, everyone needs to learn how to govern.”
Political scientist Simón said the PP had done little to suppress “the cloud of problematic hoaxes” and false narratives about the wildfires that have spread over the past few days.
During a weekend debate on TeleMadrid, the public broadcaster controlled by Ayuso’s regional government, conservative journalist Carlos Dávila claimed without evidence that the fires had been caused by “environmental fanatics” whom he said had prevented forestry workers from clearing undergrowth.
“There is no climate change, what there is is irresponsibility,” he insisted.
For Simón, the strategy echoes the response of the PP after the Valencia floods. In the wake of that disaster, the party worked to deflect responsibility onto other actors, including Sánchez and his then-Ecological Transition Minister Teresa Ribera, now a vice president of the European Commission. The central government was ultimately exonerated by Spanish courts, and the conservatives eventually accepted responsibility for the catastrophe.
But the political scientist questioned whether the current fires would inflict lasting electoral damage on the conservatives.
“It’s true that Sánchez’s Socialist Party has, in the past, gotten a bit of a boost in the polls following similar calamities,” Simón said. “But that’s only when there’s been a clearly botched response on the part of one of the PP’s regional governments, and at the moment what we’re seeing, instead, is fluid collaboration between administrations at all levels.”
Indeed, the scale of the inferno in Spain and the red-hot weather forecast has forced political rivals to put aside political turf wars — for the emergency period, at least — and team up to save lives and property.
PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has for years called for Sa´nchez to step down, but since the start of the current crisis he has opted for a more conciliatory tone. “Everyone is doing everything they can … from the central government to the smallest town hall,” he said during a press conference on Sunday. “No one should be generating more tension than that caused by the fire.”
Simón noted the collaborative dynamic had resulted in a stalemate of sorts in which attempts to score political points could backfire.
“In the longer-term, I don’t expect this will be a key issue in the national elections,” he added. “I’m sure the Socialists will raise it in an effort to link the PP to Vox, but Spaniards have a remarkably short memory when it comes to this issue.”