vGiulio Meotti is a member of the Middle East Forum and an Italian journalist with Il Foglio who writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
In ten, twenty, or thirty years’ time, we won’t be able to tell our children - or our grandchildren, or ourselves for the longest-lived and luckiest among us - that we didn’t see it coming.
Spain is the emblematic case of tactical success within the best definition of “decadence" - that of Ross Douthat of The New York Times in his book The Decadent Society. Douthat’s thesis, in short, is that Western civilization is decadent without being doomed to collapse.
The question is the one posed by the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud: “Why does the heart of the Arabs tend to support Spain in the 2026 World Cup final? Spain as an icon of the ‘Arabs’, of Muslims and Palestinians. Sánchez, an anti-Westerner in the heart of the West?"
Spain’s economy is galloping better than others (estimated growth of 2.6 percent, driven by consumption, services, and record tourism levels). The country dominates all the sports that bring glory and money (it is number one in football, tennis, and motorcycling) and, aside from the brazen corruption of the left in power, it is envied by many in Europe.
But at what price? Spain wins in the short term but hands the long term over to those who never accepted the defeat of 1492.
When a country is for sale, it begins to sell its foreign policy.
When Iran requested an urgent UN debate to condemn the United States and Israel, China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea and… Spain joined the vote. Yes, Spain.
In Europe, Spain is the asset of the Chinese regime.
Spain has not only armed Iran. It has sided with Tehran in the war, and Iran has thanked Spain.
Spain buys weapons from Erdogan’s Turkey. Hamas has praised Spain.
If Madrid were not in Europe, one would say it is more like a Middle Eastern emirate.
The price of the sale is well known. The peninsula that stopped Islamic expansion at the gates of Europe is transforming, with postmodern elegance, into the financial outpost of regimes that do not hide their expansionist ambitions.
In 2022, Qatar announced 5 billion in investments in Spain. Since then, the flow has not stopped. Another 327 million from Qatar for “sustainability." And before that, another billion into a joint fund.
Then another two billion from Oman.
While Spain aligned itself, in international forums, with actors hostile to the West - Iran, Hamas, China and other authoritarian regimes - it welcomed capital that brings with it worldviews incompatible with the legacy of the Reconquista. The peninsula that managed to expel the Jews in 1492, also ended eight centuries of Islamic rule and ushered in the European Atlantic era. It now seems to be reopening its doors, not with the sword but with contracts and demographic flows.
Just read El Mundo:
“It is almost impossible to trace the path of petrodollars in our country, but it is estimated that current investments in Spain may amount to around 20 billion euros in active investments. Of what is on the table, of what is ultimately visible, the four largest economies of the Persian Gulf account for more than 10 billion euros just in listed Spanish companies."
Spain, which was invaded by Muslims in 711 AD and remained under Islamic rule for eight centuries, is returning to Al-Andalus.
Will they succeed with money and demography? I do not rule it out.
Demography.
The New York Times seizes the opportunity to praise Lamine Yamal as the face of the “new Spain": Muslim, son of Moroccans, multicultural. “In the last five years, more than four million immigrants have arrived in Spain, a country of fewer than 50 million inhabitants. This year, more than one million immigrants have come out of the shadows after the government invited them to regularize their status."
Spain’s plan to naturalize illegal migrants will be “the largest measure in European history." 1.3 million applications have been submitted, more than double the 500,000 expected by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
1.3 million out of 49 million inhabitants: if this is not the Great Replacement, it is very close to it.
And then El Mundo speaks of 3 million regularizations.
And we Europeans will all pay the consequences. Do we only remember Schengen when it suits us?
Spain - together with Italy and Greece - is the spearhead of the collapse of the birth rate in Western Europe. Today in Spain there are 1,027 villages with no children under the age of five. This is not taken from a film, but from an article in El País. 13 percent of Spanish municipalities have not registered a single birth since January 1, 2012. And 633 municipalities in Spain have no children under the age of eleven. In 420 municipalities there is not a single inhabitant under the age of fifteen.
Leader in tourism, Spain has turned sun, coasts, culture, and nightlife into a powerful industry. Barcelona, Madrid, the Costa del Sol, and the islands generate wealth. But this success reveals a great fragility: the country has become a “theme park" for foreigners (Arabs, Chinese, Russians) with a dependence on unstable global flows. Tourism exalts the hedonistic exteriority of the country, while the interior depopulates. It is a “picture-postcard country" economy that lives off past identity rent without renewing it biologically.
Barcelona and Madrid shine, the coasts teem, sporting successes feed a national pride that masks the demographic void.
Sánchez dismisses any “humanitarian" argument and admits that mass immigration has the sole purpose of demographic replacement: “Without immigration, Spain would lose 19 percent of its GDP by 2050 and 22 percent by 2075. While others use migration for political purposes, we are implementing a migration policy."
No longer rhetoric, but a crude admission: without massive migratory flows, the social model implodes. A declared demographic engineering that trades cultural cohesion for quantitative growth.
An “American" model applied with a Mediterranean flavor: import labor to sustain welfare and consumption. It works, at least in the short term.
In 2025, the Muslim population in Spain is around 2.5 million.
With a net immigration of 300,000 Muslims per year and an average fertility rate close to 2.9 children per woman (compared to 1.2 for the rest of the population), the projection for 2050 is clear: 11 million Muslims out of a total population of 55.8 million.
That is 20 percent of the national population.
This is not speculation: it is a scenario in line with Pew Research Center projections and the latest Eurostat data.
Spain is winning the GDP race by paying the price of explicit replacement.
The signs are everywhere.
“The Monumental de Barcelona converted into a Mosque."
This is not a joke. It is the proposal of Hasan Izquierdo, a convert to Islam and mayoral candidate for Barcelona for the Andalusian Party, an Islamist formation that aims to reconvert Spain into Al-Andalus.
All this in a country that regained its freedom through arms - the Reconquista that ended in 1492 and represents its national epic. Without it, Spain would today be nothing more than an appendage of Morocco.
From 720, Muslims crossed the Pyrenees and conquered southern France. They were stopped at Tours and Poitiers by the Franks of Charles Martel. The Carolingian dynasty and the Holy Roman Empire began. The liberation of the Iberian peninsula had started from the small Christian kingdom in the north of Spain, which, with Pelayo, had resisted the Muslims.
Islam has not changed. The Christian world has.
The number of Islamic places of worship in Spain has doubled in five years, reaching 1,400 (excluding private prayer rooms), twice the 700 of 2021.
From Salt, “the Spanish city with more mosques than Catholic churches," to Catalonia, where in ten years the number of mosques has gone from 55 to 292, to Melilla, the first Spanish city to exceed 50 percent Muslim population since the Reconquista, the numbers are reversing.
The Spanish newspaper La Razón has accused Gulf funders, such as Qatar, of being a source of the Islamization of Spain.
The president of the European Jewish Congress, Ariel Muzicant, has meanwhile told Jews that it is better if they avoid Spain.
After five centuries, it is the return of Al-Andalus.
Western decadence, as Douthat intuited, is not collapse but a golden twilight in which tactical successes - GDP, medals, investments - hide the loss of the collective soul.
The question is whether the country still possesses the spiritual and demographic energy for a new Reconquista - not armed, but cultural and biological. Or whether, fascinated by its own elegant and corrupt decline, it will prefer to become a province of a soft caliphate financed by oil and legitimized by the global left.
The question is not whether it works, but what will remain of this sick Western organism that takes stimulants.