The regional elections in Aragon have left a clear political snapshot. The Popular Party wins without a sufficient majority, and Vox consolidates a growth that can no longer be dismissed as episodic. The left retreats, loses cohesion, and shows an evident disconnection with a growing part of the electorate, especially the young. The result reflects less an ideological shift than a demand for clear responses on very concrete issues that have been systematically avoided.
Among those issues, immigration and security occupy a central place. Not as moral abstractions, but as lived realities. More than twenty percent of Aragonese people have explicitly backed a discourse that points out that the current model of immigration and integration is not working. That percentage does not describe an eccentric minority or a radicalized electorate, but a significant part of society that perceives a deterioration in coexistence, pressure on public services, and an absence of effective control. Denying this data or reducing it to racism is a way of not wanting to understand what happened at the polls.
Here emerges an evident gap between a part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and social reality. Many bishops continue to address immigration from an exclusively moral framework, without attending to its practical consequences or the concrete suffering generated by poor management. The electoral result confirms that this approach no longer connects with broad sectors of the population. Not because they have abandoned Christian principles, but because they feel that no one listens to their everyday experience.
In that context, Vox’s growth among Catholic voters is also explained. Not due to full ideological adherence, but because the party defends without complexes issues that others have abandoned: human life from conception, parents’ freedom of education, the family as the basic social nucleus, and a conception of order and security that many consider essential for coexistence. In Aragon, these factors have weighed electorally and form part of the real chronicle of the elections.
Pretending to morally expel that twenty percent of the electorate from the ecclesiastical sphere, as some suggest, would be to repeat errors already seen in other countries. What happened in Germany with the AfD serves as a warning: when the Church decides to label and exclude instead of listening, it loses its pastoral function and its capacity for mediation. Voters do not disappear, but the Church does cease to be relevant to them.
Moreover, there is an issue that cannot continue to be evaded. The migratory and security problem will not be solved by subsidies. ACCEM, Manos Unidas, or Cáritas are not going to fix a failed model no matter how many hundreds of millions of public euros they continue to receive. Their welfare work can alleviate specific situations, but it does not substitute a serious policy of integration, limits, and requirements. Confusing charity with public policy is part of the problem.
The Aragonese electoral reading is simple. A relevant part of society demands order, realism, and coherence. It is not voting against human dignity, but against a system that it perceives as overwhelmed and denied from the official discourse. Listening to that message is not betraying the Gospel. Ignoring it, on the other hand, is a form of disconnection that the Church cannot afford.