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It took five days before some degree of sanity was restored in Europe, following last week’s extraordinary events in Ceuta. Alarmed by images of tens of thousands of would-be migrants swimming into the Spanish enclave on the North African coast, much of Europe’s political and media class lost its collective mind. Italy suspended air and sea links with Spain; Denmark and even Finland — the geographically furthest point in the EU from Ceuta — threatened to suspend the Schengen free-travel zone. Twenty-two EU leaders wrote a letter to the European institutions effectively blaming Spain itself for the influx.
At no point did they acknowledge that the chances of those migrants reaching mainland Europe were close to zero, since Ceuta is not in the Schengen zone. Nor did they express sympathy for the people of Ceuta, a city of 83,000 people that had suddenly found itself overwhelmed, nor solidarity with Madrid, nor horror at the deaths of at least 72 people trying to cross the border. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez was rightly furious and wrote his own letter to the EU institutions, criticising his supposed partners for their rush to judgment.
Yet EU interior ministers, at an emergency virtual meeting on Tuesday, buried the hatchet, congratulating Madrid instead on its robust handling of the crisis, now that all but a tiny fraction of those that stormed Ceuta have returned to Morocco. The change of tune is welcome, because the episode raises profoundly concerning questions for Europe. The priority must be to understand what drove the crisis and how to prevent it recurring.
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The assumption underlying the initial blame heaped on Spain was that the stampede had been triggered by a Spanish Supreme Court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily deported. That was coupled with a claim that the Sanchez government’s decision earlier this year to offer a mass regularisation for up to half a million in the country illegally signalled an open-door policy that would undermine EU attempts to control immigration.
But to the extent these played any part in the social media campaign that helped incite the stampede, it was based on misinformation. There was never any prospect of those reaching Ceuta travelling on to Spain without a passport and a visa for the Schengen zone. Nor did the regularisation scheme grant permanent residency, let alone citizenship, to anyone in the country illegally; it offered a one-year work permit with no guarantee of extension. Indeed, criticism of Spain for this programme was hypocritical, since several other EU member states, including Italy, Ireland and Germany have offered similar amnesties in recent years.
The most important question is who orchestrated the social media campaign that convinced so many young Moroccans to try their luck. It has suited both Spain and Morocco to point the finger at people-smugglers. But the evidence points to a clear role for Rabat. The New York Times, the only international outlet with a reporter on the ground, quoted multiple migrants saying Moroccan authorities were waving them through; one Senegalese migrant said the police were blocking black Africans and letting only Moroccans pass, suggesting the goal was simply to breach the border, not to allow through those who might try to reach Europe. Video footage shows Moroccan gendarmes standing by as young men poured out of trucks near the border.
Why Rabat would want to destabilise Spain in this way is an open question. Some point to Pedro Sanchez’s recent overtures to Algeria — a major gas supplier to Spain, but Morocco’s strategic rival that covets the Western Sahara over which Rabat claims sovereignty. This would hardly be the first time Morocco has weaponised migration to pressure Madrid: in 2021 it orchestrated an assault on Ceuta by some 8,000 migrants amid a dispute over Western Sahara. Going further back, Morocco prised Spanish Sahara away from Madrid by unleashing the Green March of 350,000 militants and soldiers in 1975, as General Franco lay dying.
Even more unsettling is what role, if any, the United States may have played in encouraging or endorsing Rabat’s gambit. Alongside Israel, Washington is now Morocco’s key strategic partner, following Rabat’s entry into the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term. Both Trump and Israel have made no secret of their hostility to Sanchez, who has led European opposition to their policies on Iran and Gaza. Right-wing think tanks in both countries have advocated using Ceuta and Melilla, another Spanish enclave on the North African coast, to exert pressure on Madrid. And as recently as April the US State Department appeared to shift towards supporting Moroccan claims to the enclaves, as well as recognising its sovereignty over Western Sahara.
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Even if Washington and Jerusalem had nothing to do with the crossings, their response should ring alarm bells across Europe. Even as Moroccans were flooding across the border, senior figures in both governments — including US Vice-President JD Vance and Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz — took to social media with inflammatory posts accusing Spain of failing to defend Europe’s border and issuing their usual warnings that mass migration would bring about Europe’s civilisational collapse. That the first instinct of the US Government — and Europe’s supposed ally — should be to exploit a crisis to destabilise the continent is disturbing.
Not that Europe’s homegrown far right needed encouragement to exploit the crisis for itself. Indeed, it was fear of the domestic political fallout, as much as hostility to Sanchez, that led so many EU leaders to rush to judgment against Spain. Inevitably, within hours of the crisis, Ceuta had suffered a far more dangerous invasion — that of pan-European far right provocateurs, such as Reform’s Zia Yusuf, looking to exploit it for political advantage.
The result was that at the moment when Europe was under hybrid attack — when calmer heads, unity and rationality were most needed — Europeans showed themselves timid, rancorous and fragmented. Those who wish Europe ill will have taken note of the vulnerability and are bound to exploit it again. Let’s hope that Europe’s leaders do better next time.