Sánchez returns from holiday and responds to the crisis in Ceuta after a month

Madrid. At last, Pedro Sánchez has returned from his holiday in the Canary Islands and has done what the opposition, the residents of Ceuta and a large proportion of the Spanish public had been asking him to do for the past 26 days: convene a Council of Ministers, bring together the National Security Council and set up a single crisis management centre to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Ceuta, where thousands of migrants are still wandering aimlessly, where shops are guarded by the army to prevent looting, and where there is an urgent need to manage stranded adults and lost children. Of the latter, the government has recorded nearly three thousand. Finally, Madrid has also requested emergency funding from the European Commission to tackle the crisis. In return, the Council of Ministers has approved a draft reform of the law on immigration and asylum, which, according to the Minister of the Interior, Marlaska, serves to bring the Spanish legal framework into line with the European Pact on Migration and Asylum. It tightens controls and, amongst the new measures, includes the collection of biometric data at the border.

It is, however, difficult to understand the reasons behind such a slow and contradictory political response. Sánchez had rushed to Ceuta in the early hours of the crisis, but then went on holiday for almost the whole of August. He promised the mayor, Juan Vivas, that the Home Secretary would remain on site permanently, but this did not happen, and it was only this Tuesday that another minister – the Minister for Territorial Policy – took up his post in the command centre. Sánchez had declared that the sudden wave of migration (80,000 people swimming ashore in 24 hours) was an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity, but he never specified by whom, not even after ministers from the Rabat government reiterated that Ceuta and Melilla are Moroccan. The most vocal has been Morocco’s Minister of Justice, who has delivered at least three speeches on the subject in recent weeks, but the latest to speak out was the Minister for Religious Affairs, who yesterday – just as Sánchez was convening his ministers, during a religious ceremony attended by King Mohammed VI – called for a mobilisation to “liberate the occupied territories”.

Even the extraordinary dispatch of 45,000 vaccine doses, decided by the Ministry of Health, appears to contradict Minister Mónica García’s insistence on denying a health emergency and accusing those who pointed out the city’s deteriorating hygiene conditions of xenophobia (outbreaks of scabies and tuberculosis have been identified). The style of the more senior and experienced Defence Minister is quite different. Margarita Robles addressed MPs on Tuesday, praising the behaviour of the inhabitants of Ceuta and Melilla, multi-ethnic cities characterised by exemplary religious pluralism. “They represent the best of Spain,” said Robles, who acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s ruling on migrants swimming across the border had caused a “pull factor”. Robles also condemned the role of social media in spreading rumours about alleged ‘open borders’, with the consequences we are all aware of regarding what she described as a ‘mass assault’ – an action that ‘destabilises not only Spain but the entire European Union’.

Hidden rifts within the government remain, which the opposition has little trouble exposing. If the secret services carried out their duties to the best of their ability, as the Defence Minister has reiterated, why were the borders not manned? Are we to believe her or Minister Marlaska, who claims he was not informed? This is what Esther Muñoz, spokesperson for the People’s Party, pointed out to her: “You still need to explain to us why you have sparked a diplomatic row with Italy, but not with Morocco.” But to take on Morocco, Spain would need a level of internal cohesion that it perhaps lacks. One need only listen to the statement made in the Defence Committee by the representative of Junts, the party of the Catalan separatists. Spain’s claim to sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla is weak, he said, unless the local populations are allowed to have their say in a referendum, as the United Kingdom did with Gibraltar. It was clear that he was thinking of the Catalan referendum. Ceuta and Melilla as a pretext for a chaotic ‘free-for-all’.