- 6 minutes ago
Pedro Sánchez’s visit to Ceuta quickly turned into one of the most discussed political moments in Spain, not because of a policy announcement, but because of the intensity of the public reaction he faced.
Angry protesters gathered in visible opposition, turning the visit into a scene that many observers interpreted as a public rebuke of the Prime Minister and his government.
Angry protesters gathered in visible opposition, turning the visit into a scene that many observers interpreted as a public rebuke of the Prime Minister and his government.
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00:07He landed by helicopter expecting gratitude.
00:10Instead, Pedro Sánchez was humiliated by angry protesters in Ceuta,
00:14met with whistles, curses, and a city that wanted him gone.
00:17Days earlier, 50,000 people had crossed the border in under two days.
00:20What they left behind was chaos nobody planned for.
00:25Sánchez's nightmare that began as revenge
00:27On Friday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Ceuta,
00:31and he was greeted with insults from protesters before he could even fix his tie.
00:35He flew in by helicopter with his interior minister, Fernando Gran Marlaska.
00:39He walked out looking like a man who expected a warm welcome.
00:42What he got was a wall of noise.
00:43The moment his shoes touched the heliport, the crowd let him have it.
00:46Hundreds of residents had gathered with horns and whistles,
00:49and their favorite chant for the Prime Minister was a two-word insult
00:52that translates politely to son of a...
00:54not exactly the red carpet.
00:56That was only the warm-up.
00:57They chanted for him to quit, screaming Sánchez de Mision,
01:00which simply means Sánchez, resign.
01:01Outside the Assembly Palace, they waved Spanish flags and shouted,
01:05Ceuta no se vend, or Ceuta is not for sale.
01:07They called him a sellout.
01:08They blamed him for ruining their shops.
01:10Behind the barriers, Vox politicians cheered the mob on like fans at a match,
01:13and the local president, Juan Jesses Vivas,
01:15was not even standing beside him when he gave his statement.
01:18Spanish media did not call it a visit.
01:20They called him despidito, sent off, humiliated, in about three hours flat.
01:24So how does a whole city turn on its own leader in a single afternoon?
01:28For that, we rewind a few days.
01:29It starts of all places with a court.
01:31On 29 June 2026, Spain's Supreme Court handed down a ruling called Judgment 814-2026.
01:38In plain words it said this.
01:39If a migrant swims around the border into Ceuta,
01:41Spain can no longer just hand them straight back.
01:43The sea the judges decided is not a fence.
01:45So anyone caught in the water now gets the full process.
01:47A file, a lawyer, a translator, and the right to ask for asylum.
01:51That can take months.
01:52Now here is where it gets messy.
01:54Human smugglers read that ruling and they twisted it.
01:56They spread a rumor across social media and WhatsApp that said, more or less,
02:00swim to Ceuta and Spain can never send you home.
02:03It was not true, but it did not have to be true.
02:05It only had to spread and spread it.
02:07The ground was already dry.
02:08Irregular arrivals in Ceuta were up 149% in the first half of 2026 compared to the year before.
02:14Young people in Morocco were fed up, facing high unemployment,
02:17and a wave of Gen Z protests demanding jobs.
02:19Add a rumor of easy entry into Europe, and you have a stampede waiting to happen.
02:23It did not help that Sanchez government had passed a huge amnesty back in January 2026
02:28for over a million undocumented people already living in Spain,
02:32which critics say only sweetened the pull.
02:34Then the dam broke.
02:35Between the 29th and the 31st of July,
02:37somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta.
02:41Remember, this is a city of roughly 83,000 residents.
02:44In under 48 hours, it absorbed the equivalent of most of its own population.
02:48Most swam around the territorial breakwater or waded across at low tide.
02:51Others climbed fences or slipped through gates.
02:53And on the Moroccan side, the guards who normally stop this.
02:56Witnesses say plenty of them simply watched.
02:59Videos hit the internet like a bomb.
03:01Footage showed crowds sprinting toward the city center.
03:03Some shouting, Viva España.
03:05Exhausted, thrilled, and mostly unsure of where they were even going.
03:08The world reacted fast.
03:09The White House pointed the finger straight at Sanchez's policies.
03:12Italy briefly suspended its open border Schengen checks for arrivals coming from Spain.
03:16Overnight, a local border story became a global headache.
03:19But the numbers hide the horror.
03:21This was no happy day trip.
03:22Spanish authorities say at least 72 people died.
03:25Some drowned in the rough Mediterranean.
03:27Others were crushed in a stampede on the breakwater.
03:29Ceuta's hospitals, shelters, and Red Cross posts collapsed under the weight.
03:33Reception centers ran at 1,600% of capacity.
03:36That is not a typo.
03:37The number of unaccompanied children jumped from around 180 to over 570.
03:42Part of an estimated 7,000 miners, with some kids sleeping in the streets because there
03:47was nowhere to send them.
03:48Food started running short.
03:49Then, almost as fast as it began, it emptied.
03:52Once the migrants realized Ceuta had no jobs, no housing, and no golden ticket, most turned
03:56around and walked back to Morocco on their own.
03:59By Friday evening, more than 48,000 had already returned.
04:02Which brings us back to Friday, and to Sanchez standing in front of a furious city, trying very
04:07hard to sound like a man in control.
04:09He led with comfort.
04:10Ceuta, and in second place, telling the Ceutis that all Spain is with them.
04:15All Spain is with them.
04:16All of Spain was with them.
04:17The crowd outside, whistling through the walls, did not seem convinced.
04:21So he changed gears and reached for tougher language.
04:23In second place, defining what has happened yesterday as an attack, a violation of the
04:30territorial integrity of Spain.
04:31An attack, strong words for a crowd mostly armed with swimming trunks and life vests.
04:36But Sanchez was not blaming the swimmers.
04:38He was building toward a single villain.
04:47He kept going with that same thought, laying the whole disaster at the feet of the smugglers
04:52in one specific document.
04:57There it was, the court ruling again.
04:59In his telling, the mafias took that judgment, twisted it, and lit the fuse.
05:10Wildfire, fair choice of word for a lie that pulled 50,000 people into the sea.
05:14Then he pivoted to defense, because he wanted everyone watching to see this as one terrible
05:18week, not a broken system.
05:26Down by more than a third, he insisted, a confident stat to drop while a city screams
05:31for your resignation.
05:32To his credit, though, he did not pretend the human cost away.
05:41Then came the big promise, delivered with the calm of a man being booed through concrete.
05:54Ceuta, he said, would be defended like the heart of the capital.
05:57He refused to declare a national emergency, arguing the government did not yet grasp the
06:01full size of the problem.
06:02He announced more police, more troops, and a curious plan to drop a line of floating buoys
06:06in the water to act as a pretend fence, just so the court's ruling would not apply.
06:09Roughly 90 minutes later, he was gone.
06:11The city was left with its anger, its grief, and its canceled summer fair.
06:15And if all of this felt painfully familiar to the people of Ceuta, that is because they
06:19had already lived a smaller version of it, only five years earlier.
06:24Spain had already lived this exact nightmare once in 2021.
06:28Rewind to May 2021.
06:30Same city, same fence, same helicopter landing.
06:33Different numbers but the very same shock.
06:35Back then, between 8,000 and 12,000 people poured into Ceuta in about 48 hours, with as
06:40many as 6,000 crossing in a single day.
06:42At the time, that was the largest irregular crossing into Ceuta since Spain became a democracy.
06:47Just like 2026, most were young Moroccan men, though that wave also swept in around 1,500
06:53unaccompanied children.
06:55But here is the twist that makes 2021 so important.
06:58That crisis was not really about migration at all, it was about revenge.
07:02Relations between Madrid and Rabat had gone cold in April 2021.
07:06Spain quietly let a man named Brahim Ghali into a hospital in Logroño to treat his COVID.
07:11Ghali runs the Polisario Front, the movement fighting for independence in Western Sahara,
07:15and Morocco considers him an enemy.
07:17Rabat felt betrayed.
07:18The timing was raw too, because only months earlier, in December 2020, the sitting United
07:23States president had recognized Moroccan control over Western Sahara.
07:27So when Spain gave shelter to Rabat's enemy, Morocco decided to teach its neighbor a lesson.
07:31The lesson was simple.
07:33Morocco loosened its grip on the border.
07:35Gendarmes stood aside, opened gates, and let people swim around the breakwaters.
07:39Videos later showed officers waving crowds through.
07:42Rabat blamed it on tired guards during Ramadan, but nobody was fooled.
07:45It was leverage, plain, and simple.
07:47The methods were the ones we would see again.
07:49People swam around the Terragil breakwater and the Benzupir, or waited at low tide,
07:53many using inflatable rings and life vests, mostly under cover of night.
07:57Around 80-90% were Moroccan, many from the nearby town of Efnidik.
08:01At least two people drowned.
08:02One photo went around the world, showing a Spanish civil guard officer cradling a rescued
08:06baby lifted from the water.
08:08Spain's response then was a rough draft of its response now.
08:11Marleska and the troops arrived.
08:12Sanchez flew in by helicopter.
08:14The Guardia Civil and the National Police sealed off the beaches and set up a reception
08:17point at Terragil.
08:18Within hours and days, Spain sent back somewhere between 5,600 and 7,000 people through express
08:24procedures.
08:25Hundreds of minors were moved to military bases or placed in quarantine.
08:29Many migrants left on their own once they discovered there were no jobs waiting.
08:33The city declared a state of exception.
08:34President Vivas branded the whole thing an invasion, and Sanchez called it a serious crisis
08:39and swore to restore order.
08:41The fallout stretched for weeks.
08:42Morocco recalled its ambassador and summoned the Spanish envoy.
08:45Relations froze.
08:46The European Union scrambled to talk about cooperation with Rabat.
08:50In the long run, Spain reinforced its fences and its patrols, and the fate of the leftover
08:54children became a political football that never quite stopped bouncing.
08:57Smaller crossing attempts kept happening, but none reached that scale again, not until
09:012026.
09:02Line the two up and the contrast is brutal.
09:05In 2012, there were 8,000 to 12,000 people over two or three days.
09:092026 was 50,000 or more in under 48 hours.
09:12In 2021, the trigger was cold diplomatic payback.
09:15In 2026, it was a court ruling and a viral lie.
09:18In 2021, two people died.
09:20In 2026, up to 72.
09:21Both times Spain rolled out the army and rushed people back, but in 2026, the city was simply
09:27buried.
09:28The lesson Spain should have taken from 2021 was clear.
09:31Its African border could be switched on and off by someone else's mood.
09:34The lesson it apparently forgot was to be ready for the next time, and the neighbor holding
09:38that switch has never once changed.
09:42Morocco controls the border gate, and Spain pays the price.
09:45To understand Ceuta, you have to understand one uncomfortable fact.
09:49Spain does not really control its own border here.
09:52Morocco does.
09:53And Morocco runs that border like a business deal, one it can honor or ignore depending
09:57on how it feels about Madrid that week.
09:59On paper, the system looks tough.
10:01Rabat's Royal Gendarmerie, backed by auxiliary forces and a mountain of European Union money,
10:05guards the 12 to 18 kilometer landline around Ceuta and Malia.
10:09They watch it with tall watchtowers, drones, thermal cameras, and even facial recognition.
10:13Out at sea, officers routinely drag swimmers back around the Terragil breakwater and the
10:17Benzupir, either towing their boats or handing them life vests and pointing them home.
10:21In 2024 alone, Morocco blocked 18,645 attempts to reach the enclaves by sea.
10:28It has dismantled 332 human trafficking networks in recent years, and when it catches people,
10:33the punishment is blunt.
10:34Detention, fines, or a long bus ride out into the desert far from the coast.
10:38Then there are the hot returns.
10:39For years, anyone who jumped the land fence, and until very recently anyone who swam around
10:44it, could be handed straight back to Moroccan officers with no paperwork at all.
10:48Rabat calls this humanitarian management.
10:50In plain terms, it is a favor, and favors always come with a price tag.
10:54That price is written into two things.
10:55The first is a readmission agreement signed all the way back in 1992, which says Morocco
11:00will take back people who cross illegally into Spain.
11:03The second is not really a document at all, but a mood.
11:05The warm patch in relations after 2022, when Madrid formally recognized Moroccan control
11:10over the disputed Western Sahara.
11:12In return for guarding the gate, Rabat collects European aid, gas deals, and easier visas for
11:16its citizens.
11:17Spain gets a border that mostly holds.
11:19On its best days, that arrangement looks like a triumph.
11:22It helped drive a 42.6% drop in irregular arrivals to Spain across 2025.
11:27Cut the numbers almost in half in a single year.
11:30Not bad for a handshake.
11:31But a border that runs on favors can be switched off out of spite.
11:34And in July 2026, someone flip a switch.
11:37At the peak of the surge on the 30th and 31st of July, Moroccan gendarmes did something
11:42strange.
11:42They largely stepped back.
11:43The officers who normally tow swimmers home stood on the sand and watched tens of thousands
11:47stream past them into the sea.
11:49Analysts did not read this as an accident.
11:51They read it as a message.
11:52A bit of blackmail or payback tied to Spain recently warming up to Morocco's great rival
11:56Algeria and to a wider reshuffle of whom Madrid calls a friend.
11:59In this reading, the surge was less a failure of security and more a demonstration of power.
12:04It did not help the optics that Morocco's king was reportedly on holiday near Ceuta while
12:08the border melted down.
12:09A monarch relaxing by the coast while thousands of his young citizens swam toward Europe is
12:14not the picture of a partner trying very hard.
12:16Spain's public reaction was almost comically polite.
12:19Officials praised Morocco's cooperation on returns as exemplary.
12:22They thanked Rabat for taking people back.
12:24They insisted with straight faces that the relationship was still excellent.
12:28Sanchez himself made a point of stressing that, this time, the two governments were talking
12:32to each other, constant, fluid, reasonable.
12:34Notice the phrase he tacked on to the end unlike what happened in 2021.
12:37Because five years earlier when Morocco opened the gate on purpose, it also stopped answering
12:41the phone.
12:42This time Rabat kept talking even as its guards looked away.
12:45That is the tell.
12:45Morocco was not losing control of its border.
12:47It was choosing, minute by minute, exactly how much of it to enforce and letting Spain feel
12:52every inch of that choice.
12:53Behind the polite statements, trust took a real hit.
12:56The episode revived an old and ugly accusation that Morocco treats migration as a weapon,
13:01a tap it can open and close to squeeze concessions out of Madrid and Brussels.
13:04Both governments rushed out joint statements denying any orchestration, blaming faceless
13:08human trafficking mafias instead.
13:10Spain's foreign ministry kept calling relations excellent, but everyone in Ceuta could do the
13:15math.
13:15Spain moved fast to quietly undo the court ruling that started it all, resuming hot returns in
13:20coordination with Morocco and handing hundreds of Moroccan nationals straight back within hours.
13:24It also began dropping a 500-meter floating barrier at the Terragil breakwater, a line
13:29of buoys designed to count, on paper, as a physical wall, so the old fast returns could
13:33legally continue.
13:34When your border strategy depends on installing pool floats to satisfy a judge, you are improvising.
13:39There was, to be fair, some real cooperation to point to.
13:42By Friday evening, more than 48,000 people had already been sent back across the border,
13:46and Rabat publicly agreed to speed the rest of the repatriations along.
13:49Sanchez leaned on that number hard, reminding the country that, despite this one catastrophic weekend,
13:54irregular arrivals to Spain had still fallen by more than 30% under his watch.
13:59And he folded the dead into the diplomatic ledger too, insisting that the mafias who lured
14:04young men into the water deserved the harshest punishment of all.
14:07It was a careful message.
14:09Blame the smugglers, thank the neighbor, and never quite admit the neighbor had let it happen.
14:13To see why 2026 hit so hard, you have to watch how this relationship has swung back and forth
14:19for years.
14:19Spain's enclaves have been flashpoints since the 1990s, but the pattern is always the same.
14:25Morocco tightens the border when it is happy with Spain, and loosens it when it is not.
14:29In 2021 came the first great retaliation peak, when Rabat relaxed controls over the Ghali affair,
14:34and 8,000 to 12,000 people crossed in two days.
14:37Then in 2022 and 2023, after the Western Sahara deal, the mood flipped.
14:41Morocco tightened its grip hard, arrivals plunged, and mass hot returns resumed under that old 1992
14:47agreement. From 2024 into early 2026, the pressure was low and scattered.
14:52Around 800 swimmers in 2024, 2,647 land entries into Ceuta across 2025.
14:59Morocco intercepted roughly 78,600 attempts in 2024, and Spain's total irregular arrivals
15:05stayed comfortably below 40,000 to 50,000 a year.
15:08The system, on the surface, was working beautifully.
15:11Then 2026 tipped the whole thing over.
15:13In the first half of the year, irregular land entries into Ceuta were already climbing,
15:18up somewhere between 149 and 215% compared to the year before.
15:23The warning lights were flashing.
15:24Then three forces collided at once.
15:26One, the June court ruling killed the fast return that had kept swimmers in check.
15:31Two, social media turned every successful crossing into a free advertisement, complete with cheering.
15:36And three, Morocco's guards looked the other way at the worst possible moment.
15:39President Vaivas called the situation unsustainable.
15:42The European Union held emergency talks and floated the idea of temporary border checks,
15:47and Italy went ahead and suspended its Schengen arrangement with Spain.
15:50Madrid answered with the barrier, the returns and a promise of new laws,
15:54including a plan pushed by the opposition to extend the fast border ejection rules to every crossing point,
15:59land or sea.
16:00To keep an eye on it all, Interior Minister Marleska stayed behind in Ceuta for days.
16:05The uncomfortable truth for Spain is this.
16:07Its only land border with Africa has never truly been solved.
16:11It has been managed, rented really, through deals with Morocco and rapid returns.
16:15There is a deep tension baked into the whole setup, because Spain sits inside Europe's open Schengen zone,
16:21yet it keeps this gate shut using private bargains with a country outside it.
16:24When the deal wobbles, the law shifts, and a rumor catches fire all at the same time.
16:28The entire arrangement tips over in a single weekend.
16:31Effective control of this border, it turns out, has never really been about fences or drones or buoys.
16:36It has been about diplomatic trust, and trust is the one thing Spain cannot build, buy, or install.
16:41And Spain is far from the only European country learning that the hard way.
16:46Europe believed its migrant crisis was finally over.
16:50Ceuta grabbed the headlines, but zoomed out, and it is only one loud scene in a much larger,
16:55and much quieter, story.
16:56Europe's migrant crisis did not start in 2026.
17:00It exploded 10 years earlier, in 2015 and 2016, when more than a million people arrived in the worst years,
17:06most of them crossing the sea from North Africa and the Middle East.
17:09That was the wave that shook the continent, split its politics,
17:13and taught every government a hard lesson about open borders.
17:16Here is the part that surprises people.
17:18Since then, the trend has gone down, not up.
17:21By 2025, irregular border crossings had dropped sharply.
17:24And on 12 June 2026, just weeks before Ceuta blew up,
17:28the European Union switched on its new migration and asylum pact,
17:32a sweeping set of rules built to tighten the screws even further.
17:35So the strange backdrop to the Ceuta chaos is a Europe that truly believed the worst was behind it.
17:40So who still feels the pressure most?
17:41Start with Greece.
17:42It sits on the front line of the eastern Mediterranean route, the doorway from Turkey,
17:45and it carries the heaviest load per person in the entire block.
17:48In 2025, Greece logged 594 asylum applications for every 100,000 residents,
17:54a rate far above the European average.
17:56Arrivals on that route fell 23% last year.
17:59But the pressure never truly lifts,
18:01and Greece still hosts the largest share of irregular migrants and asylum seekers among the southern states.
18:06Tiny Cyprus, for its size, feels the squeeze just as hard.
18:09Then come Italy and Spain, the two countries that catch most of the sea arrivals.
18:13Italy guards the central Mediterranean route from Libya and Tunisia,
18:17handling around 66,000 arrivals in 2025,
18:20though its overall migrant numbers fell sharply that year.
18:23Spain guards the western route,
18:24and in 2025 it took the most first-time asylum applications in the entire European Union,
18:29around 141,000, or 21% of the whole bloc's total.
18:33Italy was close behind with 126,600, about 19%.
18:37These are the front doors of Europe, and they stay busy.
18:40France and Germany play a different role.
18:41They are the destinations, the places people are trying to reach,
18:44rather than the beaches where they land.
18:46Germany received 168,400 applications in 2025.
18:50France 151,500.
18:52Germany also carries the heaviest long-term weight of anyone,
18:54with a total refugee and asylum-seeker population sitting near 2.95 million,
18:59the highest in Europe.
19:00France, for its part, issues more removal orders than anyone,
19:03yet carries out relatively few of them.
19:05A gap we will come back to.
19:06And do not forget Poland, which logged the most border rejections of all,
19:09turning away close to 30,000 people in a single year.
19:12Now here is the headline number that Sayuda made everyone forget.
19:15Across the whole European Union,
19:17total asylum applications fell 27% in 2025,
19:20down to 669,400.
19:22The faces changed too.
19:24The top nationality is no longer Syrian or Afghan,
19:26but Venezuelan, with 89,500 applications,
19:29followed by Afghans and Syrians.
19:31The map of who is coming,
19:32and from where keeps shifting under everyone's feet.
19:34None of this has been painless.
19:36A decade of arrivals has strained reception systems to breaking point,
19:39stuffed asylum offices with years-long backlogs,
19:42and turned integration into a permanent political fight in almost every capital.
19:46It has fed the rise of hard-right parties from France to Germany to Italy,
19:49each promising to slam the door for good.
19:51The steady fall in numbers since the 2023 peak owes a lot to blunt bargains,
19:55above all the money and border deals struck with Turkey,
19:58and more recently Tunisia,
19:59that keep people penned up long before they ever reach a European beach.
20:02Cheaper than fences, and far less visible.
20:05So what is Europe doing to hold all this back?
20:07Quite a lot as it turns out, and it comes in four big pieces.
20:10The first piece is deals with other countries.
20:12Europe has quietly learned that the cheapest border is the one on someone else's soil.
20:16Partnerships with Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey
20:19have choked off departures before boats ever launch.
20:21Voluntary returns from Tunisia and North Africa jump,
20:24with more than 35,800 assisted returns in 2025 alone.
20:28Joint patrols and shared surveillance did the rest.
20:30It is the exact same logic Spain uses with Morocco,
20:33just stretched across a whole continent,
20:35and it carries the exact same weakness.
20:37It only works while the partner is willing.
20:39Second piece is the borders themselves,
20:41and here Europe has gone high-tech.
20:42A new entry and exit system started rolling out in October 2025,
20:46logging every non-European traveler who comes and goes.
20:48A travel permission scheme and a rebuilt fingerprint database are due by the middle of 2026.
20:53From now on, every irregular arrival gets run through mandatory checks on identity,
20:57security, health and vulnerability.
20:59The days of slipping through unrecorded are closing fast.
21:01The third piece is the big one, the pact on migration and asylum,
21:04in full force since June 2026.
21:06This is the rulebook Europe spent years fighting over.
21:09It forces fast screening at the border,
21:10quick procedures for weak claims and anyone flagged as a risk,
21:13and speedier deportations for those who fail.
21:15Its centerpiece is a solidarity mechanism,
21:17polite phrase for making every member state share the load,
21:20whether by taking in some people, sending money, or lending staff.
21:23It sets clearer rules on safe third countries and family reunification,
21:27and it even pushes the idea of return hubs,
21:29holding centers for rejected asylum seekers parked outside the block entirely.
21:33On top of all that, in January 2026, the union added a five-year strategy,
21:37aimed squarely at smashing smuggling networks with better data and digital tools.
21:41Add it all together, and the results are real, if fragile.
21:44Irregular crossings fell 26% in 2025 to 177,766 detections,
21:50the lowest count since 2021.
21:52But the wins come with a running cost that no chart likes to show.
21:55People still drown in the Mediterranean every single month.
21:57Rights groups warn that harder borders simply shove desperate travelers onto deadlier, lonelier routes.
22:02The smaller states buckle under numbers far too big for them,
22:05while the richer ones argue endlessly over who should carry the human weight.
22:09Europe now sells itself a tidy slogan for all this, fair and firm.
22:12The firm part is easy to see.
22:14The fair part is still very much up for debate.
22:16Thanks for staying tuned.
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