Madrid, Spain – Ceuta, Spain’s African enclave and one of the European Union’s most exposed external frontiers, was pushed to the brink this summer when, over two chaotic days in late August, tens of thousands of migrants surged past the border fences from Morocco, overwhelming a city of roughly 85,000 people.
Only on the Spanish side, 83 migrants died.
Read more: Humanitarian situation in Ceuta remains dire, aid workers say
This isn’t particularly new territory for Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. In May 2021, roughly 8,000 migrants crossed in a similar rush, after Morocco eased up on its own border controls – seemingly payback for Spain letting a Polisario Front leader get hospital treatment on Spanish soil, as per Al Jazeera.
A year later, dozens died trying to get into Melilla, another Spanish autonomous city east of the Cape Three Forks.
But the July 2026 crisis dwarfed both, and it’s landing right as Spain edges toward a general election that several regional leaders are pushing Sánchez to call early, well ahead of his summer 2027 deadline.
Here, Sánchez essentially bet his Western Sahara policy on preventing exactly this kind of scene. In 2022, he tore up decades of Spanish neutrality and threw his support behind Morocco’s autonomy plan for the territory, a move everyone read as a trade: migration cooperation, steady gas, better trade terms, in exchange.
The prime minister was betting that would buy quiet borders. Instead he got a crossing eight times the size of the one that started this whole saga.
So what actually happened? Spanish intelligence’s (CNI) first read was fairly forgiving; Moroccan authorities let it happen and took advantage, but didn’t orchestrate it, and just failed to flag a wave building on social media in time.
Then, a police report went further, telling the judge overseeing the case that Moroccan border guards had actively steered the crossing, on orders from plainclothes agents, using the migrants as cover for a deliberate push to overwhelm Spain’s defenses and reassert old claims over Ceuta and Melilla.
The report also poked at an uncomfortable question closer to home: did Spain’s own CNI know something and sit on it? Morocco, for its part, denies any of this was deliberate and points instead at trafficking networks.
And on September 9, newly declassified documents, published by Moncloa, Spain’s prime ministers’ residence, show a CNI officer messaged the government’s delegation in Ceuta the day before the crossing, warning that social media groups with a combined 180,000 followers were calling for “an assault by fence and sea tomorrow at 20:00”, timed to exploit Morocco’s Fiesta del Trono celebrations, when security forces would be “tied up”.
The delegation didn’t call back for seven hours. Stranger still: that same evening, the CNI sent its own early-warning notice to Moroccan intelligence.
Spain’s spies, in other words, appear to have warned Rabat about the coming crossing roughly a full day before it happened – and it happened anyway.
The documents don’t prove the CNI foresaw a crisis of 70,000-plus people; they do prove somebody knew something was coming, on both sides of the fence.
Congress wasn’t kind to Sánchez last week. Even his own coalition partners in the Sumar left-wing political platform, went after the Western Sahara strategy, calling it fragile.
The government’s defense, that keeping Morocco onside is the only realistic path because Rabat’s cooperation is needed to get people out of Ceuta, isn’t landing with much of the public. Most voters, understandably, are just angry at Morocco.
How the right-wing radicalization became Sánchez’s best argument
A Spanish international analyst, Amin Lejarza, explained to EU Reports a very different read. “Electorally, can this affect the current government? Yes and no,” he said. “I actually think it could end up benefiting them.”
As per Lejarza, the protests that followed the crossing, including a large one on September 2, weren’t uniformly about immigration policy. Most demonstrators, he said, were simply demanding this never happen again, or standing up for the city.
But some chants were openly xenophobic, openly Islamophobic, aiming at Muslims. In a country where the electoral system doesn’t weigh votes evenly across provinces and rewards whoever mobilizes their base hardest, that matters.
Indeed, left-leaning voters, who historically skip elections more than the right does, might feel enough alarm at a radicalizing right to actually show up this time.
Lejarza also flagged something structural: interior, defense, and foreign affairs – the ministries actually on the hook here – are all run by Sánchez’s own Socialists, not by junior coalition partner Sumar.
So, whatever blame lands, it lands cleanly on one party. Notably, Sánchez’s Congress speech spent less time defending his own record and more time attacking the opposition’s anti-migrant rhetoric, a strategy Lejarza believes is already working.
Read more: Spanish PM doubles down on Israel, Russia blame as Ceuta crisis engulfs his administration
So why would Morocco risk it? Lejarza’s first instinct was that this looked reactive rather than planned, chaos, not strategy. He’s less sure now.
“When you see 80,000 people cross, and three ministers talking about historical and geographic claims, you start to wonder,” he said.
There’s context worth sitting with here: the timing sits close to Spain’s World Cup win, and tension is rising again between Morocco and Algeria over the African Atlantic Gas Pipeline, that would move Nigerian gas across Moroccan territory into Europe.
Zoom out further and you see a Morocco that’s simply stopped flinching on the world stage: a $10 billion defense deal with the Pentagon, a port in Tangier that’s now eclipsed the Spanish port Algeciras, co-hosting duties for the 2030 World Cup, warm relationships with both the U.S. and Israel – which also happen to be sore spots for Spain. Confidence like that changes how a country negotiates with its neighbors.
Still, and Lejarza was careful about this, even if Rabat never gave the order, letting 80,000 people cross in 48 hours is not a good look for anyone’s border and intelligence services.
“Whether or not it was ordered from Rabat,” he said, “this was still a disaster for Morocco’s own intelligence and border services.”
Which leaves two stories running side by side into the election. One where a preventable tragedy ends Sánchez’s run. And another where a radicalizing opposition scares just enough left-leaning voters back to the polls to save the government it was supposed to sink.
Featured image: El presidente del Gobierno, Pedro Sánchez, durante su intervención en el Congreso de los Diputados
Source: La Moncloa
Author: Pool Moncloa/Borja Puig de la Bellacasa. Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid – 3.9.2026
