Spain’s far-right Vox party has moved to scrap the Moroccan Arabic Language and Culture Program in ten schools across the Aragon region, a decision that will end classes attended by students from Moroccan and other Muslim backgrounds and which the party has openly celebrated as part of its campaign against what it calls the “Islamization” of Spain.
Aragon’s Vice President Alejandro Nolasco, a Vox leader, announced on Sunday that the program would no longer be offered from the current academic year, describing its abolition as a reality made possible by Vox’s presence in the regional government.
Nolasco presented the move as proof that the far-right party was fulfilling its electoral promises, before declaring: “No to the Islamization of Europe. And no to the Islamization of Spain.”
The decision affects ten schools in the region where the Moroccan Arabic Language and Culture Program had been taught, including eight public primary schools and the Cantín y Gamboa and El Carmen y San José schools.
The program was coordinated by staff from the Moroccan Embassy in Spain and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports, while its implementation was managed by Spain’s autonomous communities.
Its abolition was included in the governing agreement signed by the conservative People’s Party (PP) and Vox on April 22, which specifically set September 2026 as the deadline for ending the program.
The decision therefore marks the implementation of a policy long demanded by Vox, which had already called for the program to be scrapped in the Aragon Parliament in November 2025.
Vox’s municipal group in Zaragoza had also submitted a motion in June 2025 calling, among other measures, for the immediate suspension of the program across Spain, with particular emphasis on the city of Zaragoza. The motion failed to win the backing of the other political groups.
The party’s rhetoric surrounding the decision has placed the program within its broader opposition to immigration and the growing presence of Muslim communities in Spain, with Nolasco explicitly framing its abolition in terms of preventing the “Islamization” of the country.
The move is likely to have a direct impact on children from Moroccan families and other Muslim communities who benefited from classes designed to provide instruction in Arabic and Moroccan culture alongside their mainstream education.
For Morocco, the program has also represented an institutional channel for maintaining linguistic and cultural ties with a large Moroccan community living in Spain, through cooperation between the Moroccan diplomatic mission and Spanish education authorities.
The decision comes against a wider political debate in Spain over immigration, integration and the place of Islam in Spanish society, issues that have become central to Vox’s political platform and campaigning.
By linking the abolition of the program directly to its presence in government, Vox has sought to portray the measure as a concrete achievement of its political agenda rather than simply an administrative decision affecting regional education policy.
The Aragon decision could therefore become another point of tension in the broader debate over the integration of Spain’s Moroccan community, particularly as the country hosts one of Europe’s largest Moroccan-origin populations.
