Irene Montero on X: selective outrage, by the numbers

We analyzed the 11,442 tweets published by the Podemos MEP between 2011 and 2026. The result: 405 tweets on Israel and Palestine versus 35 on the other sixteen major humanitarian crises of the period — combined.

Fifteen years on Twitter, one single conflict

Irene Montero opened her Twitter account in September 2011. Since then she has published 11,442 original tweets: first as a housing activist, then as a member of parliament, Minister of Equality (2020–2023), and MEP since 2024. We downloaded that complete archive and cross-referenced it against the major humanitarian crises of the same period: wars, famines, documented genocides, mass rape used as a weapon of war, and campaigns of repression across four continents.

The question was simple: to which suffering does Irene Montero react, and to which does she not?

Nine crises, zero tweets

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict accounts for 405 tweets — more than 90% of all her output on international crises. The second most mentioned crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, receives 13. The Syrian civil war, the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the century with half a million dead and thirteen million displaced, receives 10. And beyond that, the silence becomes absolute:

Tigray, with a death toll nearly ten times higher than Gaza's, does not exist in her account. Nor does the Rohingya genocide, with its mass rapes documented by the United Nations. Nor the 276 Chibok schoolgirls. For a leader whose political identity is feminism, the absence of the crises with the highest incidence of sexual violence against women is the first uncomfortable data point. It will not be the last.

It's not just the volume: it's the direction

The volume could be explained — in part — by the centrality of Palestine in Spanish and European politics. What the volume does not explain is the directionality: reading the tweets one by one, the pattern that emerges is that the outrage does not depend on the scale of the suffering but on the identity of the perpetrator.

Syria. Throughout the entire civil war — half a million dead, chemical attacks on civilians — there is not a single condemnation of Bashar al-Assad. Her criticisms of the time point to the American strike of 2017 («violates international law») and the EU's closed borders. Her Syrian tweets of 2024–25 return to the subject for one reason only: Israel is bombing Syria.

Iran. Two tweets in fifteen years condemn regime repression: one on the murder of Mahsa Amini (2022) and another celebrating the Nobel Prize for Narges Mohammadi (2023). Against these, since 2025 she has accumulated more than a dozen tweets defending Iran against attacks by Israel and the United States, including one rebuking the EU for sanctioning Iran «for human rights».

And January 2026 provided the definitive test. Faced with the Iranian regime's massacres of January 8 and 9 — thousands of protesters killed, up to 20,000 according to the UN Special Rapporteur, «the greatest repression in decades» according to Amnesty International — her only Iranian tweets those weeks attack the EU for sanctioning Iran «for human rights» and accuse Europe of «using women» and «legitimate protests»: she acknowledges the protests are legitimate in the same sentence in which she turns them into an argument against the West, without devoting a single word of condemnation to the regime massacring their participants.

«Ni una sanción a Israel en 3 años de genocidio ni a EEUU por sus crímenes, pero la Unión Europea sí sanciona a Irán "por derechos humanos".»@irenemontero, 12 January 2026 · 12,793 likes

Cuba. Eleven tweets in fifteen years, all aligned with the Cuban government's discourse: against the «criminal blockade», an account of her meeting with the Cuban head of state in 2025, a defence of Havana against European criticism. On the protests of 11 July 2021 — the largest popular mobilization in decades, with over a thousand arrested — nothing. On political prisoners, nothing.

Venezuela. Zero original tweets on repression or on the exodus of 7.7 million people, the largest displacement in the hemisphere. But when the United States attacked Venezuela in 2026, she produced her most viral international tweet (36,127 likes) demanding Spain break «every alliance with the US, starting with NATO».

Ukraine. Three institutional tweets in 2022 when she was a minister — including solidarity with Zelenski during his visit to Congress. Since leaving government, her ten tweets on Ukraine are all against NATO and arms deliveries. Bucha and Mariupol never appear.

October 2023: the most eloquent silence

On 7 October 2023, Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 — the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with mass sexual violence subsequently documented by the United Nations. That day and the next, the then Minister of Equality tweeted about a Podemos event in Mérida.

Her first reaction to the conflict came on 9 October. It was not about the victims: it was against the Israeli Minister of Defence. On 13 October she published «Not in our name» — 26,246 likes — against the Israeli response.

The data from the complete archive are these: the word «Hamas» appears just once in fifteen years — on 16 October 2023, in a tweet whose purpose is to recall that «Netanyahu in 2019 asked to fund Hamas». The word «hostages» appears zero times. The sexual violence of 7 October — investigated by the UN — was never mentioned by the minister of «hermana, yo sí te creo»: in her account, the phrase «rape as a weapon of war» exists only attributed to Israel, from 2024 onwards. And her only mention of the date came in January 2025:

«El genocidio no empezó el 7 de octubre ni termina con el alto al fuego.»@irenemontero, 23 January 2025

The counter-arguments examined

First counter-argument: Palestine is more salient in Spanish politics. True, and it would explain a disproportion of three or five to one. It does not explain a twelve-to-one ratio against all other crises combined, nor the nine absolute zeros, nor why the measuring stick changes depending on who the perpetrator is.

Second: her peak coincides with her time as MEP (2024–26), when Gaza dominated the European agenda. Also true. But in that same period, Sudan was living through a declared famine and the fall of El Fasher — and received exactly one tweet, which moreover asks «who is behind the genocide in Sudan?», shifting the focus to Western complicity.

Third: she is not responsible for foreign policy. But international politics is today her main subject on X — 32% of her tweets as an MEP. The selectivity does not occur in a field she avoids, but in the one she herself has chosen as central.

The conclusion the data allow is precise: Irene Montero's attention to humanitarian crises is not distributed according to the scale of the suffering, but according to an ideological filter stable over fifteen years — maximum when the designated responsible party is Israel, the United States or NATO; silence or active defence when the responsible party is a politically aligned regime.

Two leaders, one and the same pattern

This profile is not an isolated case. Applying the same method to the complete archive of Ione Belarra, secretary general of Podemos (11,299 tweets, 2011–2026), the pattern repeats and even intensifies: 683 tweets on Israel/Palestine versus 71 for the other sixteen crises combined, and zero tweets on Mahsa Amini and the Iranian feminist revolt of 2022. Between the two top leaders of the party, they total 1,088 tweets on one conflict and not a single one on the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the Chibok schoolgirls, or the political prisoners of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The asymmetry is therefore not the particular sensitivity of one leader: it is a structural pattern within the party leadership. This series will continue adding profiles — including from La France Insoumise — to measure how far it extends.