'Fascist influencer' and Left-wing rapper plunge Spain into free speech row

One is an admirer of Hitler who likes to wear a Franco-era blue shirt; the other is a Left-wing rapper whose lyrics attack Spain’s royal family and pay homage to convicted terrorists.

Together they have triggered a fiery debate over the limits of free speech in Spain this week that has led to riots across the country.

In a fifth night of clashes, protesters threw bottles at police, set fire to containers and smashed up shops in Barcelona on Saturday.

Pablo Hasel, a Catalan musician, was arrested by the police to serve a prison sentence this week for his offensive lyrics. His Leftist supporters poured onto the streets, clashing with riot police, to protest at the draconian ruling.

But many also cried hypocracy, accusing authorities of double standards over the case of Isabel Medina, an 18-year-old "fascist influencer" allowed to march in Madrid just days before to deliver a highly antisemitic speech.

One observer pointed out: "They stick Pablo Hasel in prison for inciting hatred in tweets and songs but leave Isabel Peralta free after she incites hatred towards Jews. Spain is different."

Last Sunday, as Mr Hasel was preparing to barricade himself inside a university building in his Catalan home city of Lleida to avoid arrest, Ms Medina was taking part in an authorised march to pay homage to the dead from the Blue Division, soldiers sent by the Spanish dictator General Franco to fight for Hitler in Russia.

“The enemy is always going to be the same one, albeit with different masks: the Jew”, the 18-year-old Ms Medina, in a blue shirt emblazoned with the Falangist fascist party’s yoke-and-arrows symbol, told a crowd of stiff-arm saluting neo-fascists before a monument to Blue Division casualties in a Madrid cemetery.

Spanish media quickly outed her as the daughter of a politician who had once dallied with a fascist party before joining the conservative Popular Party.

Ms Medina claimed to have been an activist for five years since “falling in love” with fascism and Hitler, and to have left behind her days as an online fashion influencer on the social media site 21 Buttons.

Mr Hasel’s combative ultra-Left wing lyrics first got him arrested in 2011, and since then he has been convicted twice for glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his raps and comments on Twitter, as well as other crimes including assault and threats.

The 32-year-old Hasel’s last stand was broken on Tuesday, when a large police contingent broke the padlocks and arrested the rapper, sparking a series of violent protests by supporters in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities around Spain, with dozens injured in clashes between riot police and demonstrators.

A schism formed between Spain’s Left-wing coalition partners, with members of the hard-Left Podemos supporting the demonstrations and flagging incidents of heavy-handed policing, while Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist party said that “violence is unacceptable in a democracy”.

Mr Hasel’s supporters said the phrases that have seen him sent to jail, in which he blames the police for torturing terrorists to death in prisons and depicts former Spanish king Juan Carlos as a drug-consuming whoremonger who sells weapons to the Saudis, are merely opinions.

“They may be distasteful or shocking,” Esteban Beltrán, the director of Amnesty International Spain, said. “But expressions that do not clearly and directly incite violence cannot be criminalised.”

Others point to alleged conservative tendencies within Spain’s authorities, with more than 100 people being convicted of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy since 1980, while charges were recently dropped against police officers caught in a WhatsApp chat group wishing death on Left-wing politicians.

The Spanish government notes that more than 1,700 hate crimes were registered in 2019, with gender and racial discrimination the largest categories.

Spain’s public prosecution service has announced that it is investigating possible anti-Semitic hate crimes at the Blue Division rally.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sánchez has announced a reform to “extend freedom of expression” and prevent cases of jail sentences for opinions, such as that of Mr Hasel.

“The law cannot prohibit ideas,” Isabel Serrano, the head of the constitutional law department at Madrid Complutense University’s Media Faculty, told The Telegraph.

“Under the law as it stands Hasel has to go to prison, but those laws – glorifying terrorism, insulting the monarchy and the state – must be done away with.”

Dr Serrano says the law defending the king’s honour is “obsolete” and that the royal family can defend itself against slander, like any other institution, while the terrorism laws stem from decades ago when the now-defunct Basque organisation Eta killed scores of people each year.