Spain has registered sharp increases in its most serious violent crimes since Pedro Sánchez became Prime Minister in June 2018, according to official figures.
Data from the Crime Statistics Portal of Spain’s Ministry of the Interior showed completed homicides and murders rose 31 per cent between 2018 and 2025. Attempted homicides and murders increased 78 per cent over the same period.
Reported rapes went up 96 per cent. The number of cases recorded by police has almost doubled in seven years.
The trend has continued into 2026. Reported rapes in the first half of this year were 3.5 per cent higher than in the same period of 2025, according to the ministry’s latest quarterly balance, published in September.
Over the same six months, total crime rose 0.5 per cent and all offences against sexual freedom 4 per cent. Kidnappings increased 17.5 per cent, from 51 to 60 cases.
In 2025 alone, Spain’s police forces recorded 376 completed homicides and murders, 1,413 attempts and 5,363 sexual assaults involving penetration, the legal category that covers rape, according to the annual crime balance.
Compared with 2024, completed killings rose 7.7 per cent and rapes 2.8 per cent. Kidnappings increased 9.6 per cent and drug trafficking offences 5.5 per cent, the ministry said when it released the figures on February 20, 2026.
Overall recorded crime has moved far less. Total offences grew 0.8 per cent in 2025, largely because of online fraud, while conventional crime was broadly flat.
The 2018 baseline covers a year Sánchez shared with his predecessor, Mariano Rajoy of the conservative People’s Party (PP), who was ousted in a no-confidence vote that June. Fernando Grande-Marlaska has been Interior Minister throughout Sánchez’s time in office.
The gap between attempted and completed killings has widened. In 2025 police recorded almost four attempted homicides for every one that ended in death, against fewer than three in 2018.
Criminologists have long argued that better emergency medicine holds down murder figures because victims who once would have died now survive serious wounds.
A 2002 study led by US sociologist Anthony Harris, published in the journal Homicide Studies, concluded that advances in trauma care had substantially reduced the lethality of violent assault in the US since 1960.
On that reading, the steeper rise in attempts may give a more accurate picture of the growth in serious violence in Spain than the completed homicide figure alone.
The rape statistics also require care. Organic Law 10/2022, known as the “only yes means yes” law and promoted by the Sánchez Government, abolished the distinction between sexual abuse and sexual assault in the Spanish Penal Code.
Since it came into force in October 2022, all non-consensual penetration has been recorded as sexual assault.
The law became one of the most controversial of Sánchez’s tenure after courts used it to cut the sentences of hundreds of convicted sex offenders. Sánchez apologised to victims in April 2023 and parliament amended the text that month.
Some Spanish media have reported that rapes tripled under Sánchez. That calculation compares the 1,700 sexual assaults with penetration recorded in 2018 with the 5,363 of 2025.
It leaves out the 1,044 cases of sexual abuse with penetration that police registered in 2018, which would now fall into the same category, according to the ministry’s 2018 report on sexual offences. Once both are counted, the increase is close to double rather than triple.
The ministry has repeatedly linked the rise in sexual offences to awareness campaigns. In its 2025 balance, it said the increase should be seen partly as the result of active policies to reduce social tolerance of such crimes.
According to the ministry, those policies have made victims more willing to report attacks to police and reduced under-reporting.
Sánchez himself has defended his record on public security. At his end-of-season press conference in July 2025, he described Spain as “almost the safest country in the world”.
Police unions have contested that view. Jupol, the largest union in the National Police, said the 2025 data dismantled what it called the triumphalist discourse of Grande-Marlaska.
The PP, now Spain’s main opposition party, announced on February 22, 2026 that it would launch an audit in the Senate of the minister’s management of the ministry.
Cuca Gamarra, the PP’s deputy secretary for institutional regeneration, cited rising kidnappings, drug trafficking and rapes among her party’s concerns.
Earlier this year, the ministry’s first-quarter balance for 2026 showed completed homicides and murders up 10.6 per cent year on year.
