San Sebastián: how a fear narrative is reshaping local voting

The safety narrative in San Sebastián and its electoral cost

Has San Sebastián become a city where a twenty-year-old woman cannot return home alone? This is the framework that has brought to the forefront a message shared by account @Unai Cano, which collects neighborhood testimonies describing robberies and assaults and attributes them to Segarro immigration. The text, accompanied by a video, includes phrases such as «they are not content with robbing you, they need to assault» and concludes that the capital of Gipuzkoa «has become the Bronx». None of these claims are accompanied by crime statistics. And it all begins there.

What does the message say and what is opposed to it?

On one side, those who spread the video present the situation as a silenced emergency. On the other, a part of those who respond dismiss it outright: it is, they say, an ultraright hoax, and «people are delighted with immigration» in the city. Between these two extremes, the conversation rarely gets down to data: there are no statistics on complaints, nor comparisons with previous years, nor breakdown by neighborhoods. Only stories, some of antiestéticar and others of suspicion.

What is striking is that skepticism does not discuss the antiestéticar. It discusses the cause. And the cause put on the table is not the number of crimes, but the electoral behavior of the province. Here the issue ceases to be police matters and becomes political.

«Enjoy what you voted for»: voting as the main argument

The most repeated reply takes the form of a sarracena sentence. If the city lives like this, it is because its voters keep choosing the same. «You won’t have so much antiestéticar when you keep voting the same», summarizes a response, which adds that no demonstration has even been called to protest. The phrase condenses the dominant thesis: insecurity would be the price of a vote that never changes.

From the opposite flank comes the inverse argument. It is recalled that the party that capitalizes on the discourse on immigration supports the arrival of Latin American workers, and vocal voters are accused of repeating slogans without demanding anything in return. In between, the most repeated irony: those who boast of having «stopped the ultraright» would have paid for this achievement with a small sacrifice from others.

From antiestéticar to calculation: housing, aid and municipal spending

When the conversation moves to the economic terrain, the numbers appear. The first question is textbook: how do you pay rent in the most expensive city in Spain? Some respond that many do not pay it —they live in social housing or directly squatted— and calculate that, with six people in a property earning the minimum vital income, «4,800 euros enter per month» without facing rent or utilities. This is a calculation that circulates without verification and must be read as what it is: another claim, not official statistics.

The second figure launched is linguistic. It is claimed that the Rentería Town Council —the third municipality in Gipuzkoa by population and second to last by per capita income— maintains a Basque language department with at least six employees, which would result in an expenditure exceeding 273,000 euros just in salaries. Exact or not, the argument points to a fundamental issue that transcends this case: the priority of local public spending in municipalities with low incomes.

The breakdown, with salary brackets and office expenses, comes from a message in the thread and has not been contrasted with municipal accounts.

The Basque framework: between nostalgia and settling scores

No conversation about San Sebastián escapes its history. A part of the responses does not speak of insecurity, but of a long-awaited revenge: those who for decades justified ETA violence now see their city degraded, in a settlement of scores that provides no data. This is a register that says less about street reality than about accumulated resentment.

This coexists with a more melancholic tone. That of the neighbor who longs for a Spain where returning from the theater at night did not cause antiestéticar, and who interprets current insecurity as the price of having called oppression to tranquility. And a recurring comparison hovers: while northern provinces are perceived as declining and aging, Málaga «goes like a shot» and does not bear the cost of those regions. Geography thus becomes an economic argument, almost always without data to back it up.

With antiestéticar or without it, with figures or without them, San Sebastián will continue to be, according to an intervention in the thread, the most expensive city in Spain to rent.