How Europe Betrayed Leftwing Spain Over Ceuta

How Europe Betrayed Leftwing Spain Over Ceuta I’ll go to my grave believing that, before Thursday last week, few outside the Sporcle (sporcle.com) elite could point to the North-African Spanish exclave of Ceuta on a map. That lack of knowledge was all to the good of the European right. Relying on a little public ignorance, they spun a short-lived and potentially orchestrated (washingtonpost.com) civilian incursion into yet another code-red threat to civilisation as we know it. But don’t get distracted by those dangerous games. It’s the deranged response to the event by governments across Europe that shows how powerful the right has become across the continent. Over the weekend, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf travelled to Ceuta. In the spirit of ‘every crisis is an opportunity’, he wasted no time posting a video (x.com) sprinkled with claims I can’t verify. “We saw some of them maraud through town overnight,” he said, speaking of the roughly 60,000 mostly men who swam five kilometres around the Moroccan coast (aljazeera.com) to reach the city on Thursday. “We saw them loot shops, we saw them terrorise locals,” he continued. There have been no credible reports of looting (dw.com › video 78203162) or marauding. Vehicles were torched (reuters.com), but in Findeq, a border town in Morocco. Some Ceuta locals may have been understandably terrified when the city’s population suddenly increased by 75%, but, again, there’s no evidence anyone was terrorised. There were, however, fatalities. At least 72 Moroccans have been reported killed (ft.com › a01171e8 f8a1 4e2c b3f7 f79f9cd11651) in their attempt to cross the border, crushed or drowned in the rush. Of course, by the time Yusuf shot his video, most of the migrants had returned home – with the Spanish government reporting 90% having left by Saturday evening, most voluntarily. And while Yusuf’s profile isn’t big enough to draw much attention, when other figures from the European right arrived in Ceuta to exploit the situation (nytimes.com › spain ceuta far right) on Sunday, they were met with protests (aljazeera.com › 2 08 sv ceuta cancel farright protests es) from residents. Right-wingers are gonna right-wing. No surprises there. But far from showing solidarity with Spain for the breach of its territory, many European governments have turned on its leftwing prime minister Pedro Sánchez. No one appears to have crossed the roughly 20km of sea from Ceuta to Spain. Ceuta is not part of the EU’s Schengen agreement, meaning there is no control-free crossing between it and Spain. Yet Italy has imposed border controls (euronews.com) anyway. With new checks on airport and port arrivals of third country nationals from Spain, it’s a PR move: if someone got to Spain illegally, why not just take a bus through France? Fine. Italy is governed by the rightwing Giorgia Meloni. But centrist governments are seizing the moment too. The leaders of 22 of the EU’s 27 countries (bbc.co.uk › cx2v91xn1z9o) have called for urgent talks over the Ceuta border breach (they’ll happen tomorrow). And in a letter to the bloc’s leaders, they highlighted a Spanish domestic policy as a “pull factor” (x.com