A taxpayer-funded study intended to highlight rising racism in Spain has found that the most discriminated-against group is … white Spaniards.
Despite the Socialist government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez hoping to spotlight the challenges faced by minority groups, the report reveals that the ethnic group reporting the most discrimination is white people of Mediterranean origin.
The Ministry of Equality commissioned the study at a cost of €113,000, with €108,420 going to consultancy Red2Red and a further €4,499.93 spent on presenting the results during March’s Anti-Racism Week. The resulting document, El impacto del racismo en España, is based on more than 2,200 in-person interviews conducted in 2024 and aimed to offer a precise picture of racial and ethnic discrimination across the country.
To the government’s surprise, the findings show that 33.9% of white Mediterranean respondents said they had experienced unequal treatment from local public administration services. By contrast, 25.2% of Afro-Latin Americans, 22.9% of Roma, and 19.6% of Black Africans reported similar experiences.
One key change in this edition of the study was the switch from telephone to face-to-face interviews, a methodological upgrade that improves data reliability.While the Spanish government had hoped the study would help reinforce its messaging around structural racism and the marginalisation of minority groups, the outcome has reportedly caused discomfort within parts of the Equality Ministry. The data instead point to a widespread perception of discrimination that cuts across ethnic lines—diluting the narrative that racism in Spain flows predominantly in one direction.
