Ceuta: the crisis that could definitively bring down Pedro Sánchez

MadridPedro Sánchez has had to face many crises since he arrived at Moncloa in 2018. The Procés, the pandemic, the outbreak of corruption cases in the PSOE, and the proliferation of new wars in the international context. The Ceuta crisis is the latest, but while Sánchez has overcome all the ones he has experienced so far, the massive entry of immigrants on July 30 has overwhelmed the Spanish government. The week of appearances by a dozen ministers to account for the management of the crisis has only created a sense of disarray. With Sánchez, moreover, practically absent.

Humanitarian and social crisis

The outbreak of violence in Ceuta was unfortunately predictable considering that for a month hundreds of people have been wandering, without their most basic needs met, through the autonomous city, and residents cannot go about their normal lives. Why has the provision of spaces not been accelerated? Why was there not a sufficient police deployment to protect the migrant camp that they burned? The worst hypothesis is that the Spanish government did not activate basic infrastructure immediately because it expected the immigrants to leave on their own. A decision that would have already entrenched a humanitarily unsustainable situation and turned Ceuta into a social powder keg.

Political crisis

The Spanish government has not been able to agree on a single political narrative to try to explain the crisis. The week has been marked by the clash of versions between the Interior and Defense ministries regarding whether or not the CNI warned about what could happen. When Robles says yes, she is only trying to save the jobs of the intelligence services, but she puts the entire Spanish government in check, because if there was information about a surge in entries and also about messages on social networks, why wasn't action taken? Nor have they explained why it took them a month to activate the single command and convene the National Security Council. In fact, it has now become evident that they had not done so previously.

Morocco's defense

The narrative the government has put forward about the origin of the massive influx of immigrants has generated doubts among both the right and the left of Congress. The ministers have attributed the events to a viralization of fake news about the Supreme Court ruling that rejected pushbacks in case of entering by swimming. However, they have not clarified where the coordinated action came from – beyond a reference to the "far-right international" – and they have indeed absolved Morocco of responsibility for the crisis, even though it was supposed to control the other side of the border. There is a hypothesis to explain this stance: the executive fears that the same thing will happen again – Morocco collaborated so that August 15th would not be repeated – and, at the same time, it does not want to reveal that Sánchez's commitment to a policy of appeasement with the Alawite country after Arancha González Laya's departure from the Foreign Ministry – remember the shift on Western Sahara – has not quite worked.

It remains to be seen if the Spanish government will restore order in the coming days, but this crisis is undoubtedly a torpedo to the image of a progressive executive that Moncloa has wanted to project, which has championed migrants' rights, especially with regularization. And it is also electoral fuel for the far-right. Furthermore, it adds to the other challenges the government already had to face: corruption cases, financing, the amnesty, or the presentation of the budgets. In short, Sánchez finds himself in a devilish scenario from which he will hardly be able to emerge unscathed.