It is still unclear how much orchestration lay behind what happened at Ceuta, but something deliberate does appear to have taken place. Morocco let thousands of young people believe they could cross, pulling its own security forces back from the border for hours, only to return later with water cannon and tear gas against those still trying to force their way through: clashes at Fnideq and the Beni Nsar crossing, burned vehicles, dozens of arrests. The toll is tragic and still provisional: at least 84 people have drowned, with reports suggesting the number may still rise, on top of roughly thirty already recorded since the start of the year. By last night, more than 48,000 of the roughly 50,000-60,000 who had entered were already back in Morocco on their own, humiliated and hungry.
Morocco is an authoritarian monarchy, elections notwithstanding, that claims growth of nearly 5%, yet leaves four million young people without work or training, and almost a third of those aged 15 to 24 unemployed. In short, the young people who threw themselves into the sea are the poisoned fruit of too few legal migration routes and of the failure of governments, often financed and backed by the West, to offer their citizens any real prospects. All this came just days after Sánchez’s rapprochement with Algeria, an authoritarian regime harsher still than Morocco’s, where Tebboune was re-elected with 84% of the vote amid the repression of dissent. The old myth of Europe as an easy escape route also remains powerful among young Moroccans, as Tahar Ben Jelloun has been repeating these past few days.
Although it is very probably the primary party responsible for what happened in Ceuta, Morocco has not been publicly accused by the Spanish government, which has spoken only of “excellent cooperation” with Rabat — a sign, plausibly, of a wish not to worsen relations with Morocco, and also of a certain weakness, in a Europe that keeps outsourcing control of its own borders to authoritarian regimes. It is the same playbook Erdogan’s Turkey used against Greece in 2020, loading migrants onto buses to extract more money from Brussels — and one Italy knows well from its own dealings with Libya.
Backstage manoeuvring and suspicions aside, what is clear is that there was never any tangible threat to IEurope: no flow toward the continent, as the EU itself confirmed, no additional pressure recorded anywhere. And yet Trump called it a “terrible” crisis; Russian trolls went into overdrive; Le Pen revived her proposal to reserve Schengen for EU citizens only; Weidel shared the images demanding borders be shut immediately; Musk compared it to a zombie invasion; Vox called Sánchez a “traitor” leading a “perfidious and corrupt mafia.” Ceuta became an improper weapon in the hands of the international far right, serving both Trump and the authoritarian regimes that know exactly how to use it. Quite a performance from Europe’s self-styled “nationalists,” it must be said.
And now the story has taken a graver turn. On 1 August, twenty-two European heads of state and government , the letter promoted, tellingly, by Meloni and Friediksen, asked Brussels to convene an emergency videoconference of interior ministers, pointing at Spain’s mass regularisation as a possible “pull factor” and questioning EU-Morocco cooperation. Ursula von der Leyen agreed within hours. That Denmark should co-sign such a letter is the real scandal here: this is a government that still calls itself social-democratic, that for years has justified its own hardline migration stance by claiming it would “de-fang” the far right and instead it has now put its name, alongside Meloni’s, on a document that scapegoats a fellow EU government for a crisis Morocco created and Spain resolved in 48 hours. If this is what European social democracy under pressure looks like, the lesson could not be clearer: chasing the right’s framing does not neutralise it, it legitimises it and Denmark, of all countries, should have known better.
Sánchez did not take it quietly. He called the EU’s response “rather asymmetric”: most governments, he said, offered Spain support and solidarity, while others “chose to attack Spain” and demanded its temporary exclusion from Schengen, an approach he branded as driven by “prejudice, disinformation, ignorance or political interest,” and “contrary to European law, to humanitarian law, to the principles of solidarity that unite us, and to Europe’s own long-term interests.” He noted, pointedly, that Spain’s irregular entries over 2021-2026 are, according to Frontex, roughly half of Italy’s over the same period: hardly the profile of Europe’s leakiest border. Ceuta, he added, isn’t even functionally part of Schengen’s free-movement area, since departures toward mainland Spain remain tightly controlled.
As for Italy, the government, caught up in Vannacci-fuelled hysteria ( Vannacci created Futuro Nazionale a brand new party which already overtook Lega and grows every week) has not actually suspended the Schengen treaty: it has activated, for one month, the Borders Code clause solely on flights and ferries from Spain. The European Commission has already formally asked Italy to notify and justify the measure, explaining exactly how Ceuta constitutes a serious threat to Italian public order, a request that, so far, has gone unanswered convincingly. Meloni was not unaware of these limits; she chose to ride the wave anyway, with Vannacci’s new party pressing her from the right.
The hard numbers do not justify the alarm, and above all they clear Spain of the charge of being Europe’s sieve. Between 2023 and 2025 Italy recorded over 290,000 irregular landings in total (157,651, 66,617 and 66,296), plus another 8,379 in the first four months of 2026. Spain, over the same three years, recorded roughly 157,000 — less than half. On returns, Spain is anything but lax: in the first quarter of 2026 it issued 9,275 expulsion orders, nearly double Italy’s 4,900, according to Eurostat. And the much-criticised Spanish regularisation, besides being far from unique in Europe, grants a residence permit, not citizenship. It concerns people already in Spain for years, not those arriving from Ceuta today: the young people interviewed these past days never cited it as their reason for fleeing. The numbers, according to the Funcas foundation, show that regular migrants have contributed nearly half of Spain’s GDP growth since 2022 — growth now running at 2.8%, against 1.4% for the European average and barely 1% for Italy.
But Meloni’s goal is not to solve a problem: it is to turn a serious challenge into an existential threat, in order to manufacture the fear and division that serve her politically, betting that a frightened public will believe almost any alarm. It doesn’t seem to matter that a migration policy built on closures and rules that make falling into irregularity easier ends up hurting growth. Italian businesses were looking for over 568,000 workers in July alone, struggling to find nearly half of them (42.6%); in preceding months, between a fifth and a quarter of planned hires were explicitly earmarked for foreign staff (source: Unioncamere); and in 2025 only 7.9% of the quotas under the Decreto Flussi actually translated into a residence permit. And while the government works itself into outrage over who arrives, it says nothing about who leaves: in 2025 Spain became the top destination for people leaving Italy (12.2%), overtaking Germany (11.5%) for the first time. With all due differences not least that they risk nothing crossing the sea these young Italians, too, are looking elsewhere for what their own country no longer offers.
What’s really at stake behind the images from Ceuta, naturally, are the elections due next year in many European countries, and with them the choice between two ways of facing the migration challenge: those who cynically exploit it to stoke fear and discrimination, playing into the hands of outside powers keen to divide Europeans and pull them away from their own values — richly-funded think tanks and far-right associations included and those who accept that our countries need migrant labour and work to build rules capable of guaranteeing secure borders and legal pathways together, rejecting the manipulations that Meloni and Vox are amplifying today.
of course there are many opinions on between and it is Far from me to turn Sánchez, who has plenty of problems of his own making at home, into a progressive icon.
Besides, no one is disputing that borders should be controlled and rules respected, but that is precisely the point. Spain shows that it is at least possible to try to have both things, serious rules and economic growth, without having to choose between security and development. It is a model worth studying closely, before dismissing it as “do-gooding” or as a favour to an invasion that isn’t happening — not least because the real numbers say it is working better than many others. And it is worth asking, too, whether the young people who ran for the beach to reach Europe weren’t also pushed there by policies that, in chasing the illusion of zero immigration, end up serving the dirty games of traffickers and autocrats.
