When Pedro Sánchez agreed to appear in the Spanish parliament’s hearings on the Ceuta migration crisis, he knew he would face a hostile audience. But Thursday’s session promises to be a political reckoning for the Spanish leader, with an emboldened opposition and increasingly distrustful coalition partners seizing on a police report claiming that Morocco played a direct role in last month’s sudden arrival of 72,000 migrants in the autonomous city in North Africa. The report has dramatically raised the stakes for Sánchez.
With the prime minister’s credibility eroding, lawmakers are demanding to know how Spain’s security services failed to detect a hostile operation by a supposedly close ally — and whether the government knew more about Morocco’s role than it previously admitted. He doubled down on that position on Monday, assuring the public he had “no information from Spanish security forces or our intelligence services that would cast any doubt on Moroccan authorities,” and instead accusing Russia, Israel and “an international far-right group” of orchestrating the operation. But according to the police report, first revealed by Spanish newspaper El Español, Moroccan agents helped orchestrate the mass entry of migrants into the exclave.
El País later published a page from the document with images that appeared to show uniformed Moroccan security officers guiding groups of people toward the beach from which they could cross into Ceuta. The document was commissioned by a judge investigating the surge and drawn up by the National Center for Immigration and Borders, a specialized intelligence unit within Spain’s National Police. In a letter to National Police Director Francisco Pardo, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska on Wednesday denied knowing of the report’s existence and expressed irritation that its contents had not been shared with the top officials convened to manage the crisis.
Justice and Presidency Minister Félix Bolaños said the government had only learned of the document through the press and declined to comment on it until it had been properly examined. The report complicates the government’s efforts to avoid a direct clash with Rabat, whose assistance is needed both to deport unauthorized migrants and to prevent future surges. Sánchez on Monday insisted the crisis could “only be resolved with cooperation,” and that “showing a lack of confidence in Morocco will only aggravate this situation.” The report has turned Thursday’s hearing into a much more consequential political test for Sánchez.
Far-right Vox party MEP Jorge Buxadé on Wednesday urged Spain’s parliament to invoke Article 102 of the Constitution, which provides for criminal proceedings against members of the government in certain circumstances. The junior partner in the executive, Sumar, has long questioned Rabat’s role in the crisis, and on Wednesday one of its member parties demanded Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska — who has always attributed the surge to human smuggling mafias — to step down if the information in the police report is proven to be true. That political isolation was also on display on Spain’s streets on Wednesday evening, with tens of thousands of protestors in participating in nationwide demonstrations condemning the situation in Ceuta.
Protests were held in more than 260 cities, with dozens of Socialist mayors defying orders from the party leadership and taking part in rallies in support of the exclave. Their revolt underscores Sánchez’s difficulty enforcing party discipline among local politicians who increasingly see him as a political liability. With municipal and regional elections next May, the protests are a stark sign of the prime minister’s fragile standing heading into a crucial political year.
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