Pedro Sánchez Lost Control at Ceuta and Blamed Everyone Else

My priors first, because they matter for what comes after. I think immigration built the Spain that tourists queue up to photograph, and I think the loudest voices on this subject are usually arguing about something else entirely. When Ted Cruz said the socialist prime minister of Spain was handing amnesty to millions of military-age African men, my instinct was to argue with Cruz, not with Sánchez.

Then came the last two days of July.

On Ceuta, the people I usually argue against are right. Not partly right. Not right for the wrong reasons. Right.

The test of control isn’t the crossing. It’s the counting.

Around seventy-two thousand people crossed into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July, by the Interior Ministry’s own figure, and roughly seventy thousand were pushed back to Morocco within hours. More than eighty of them died doing it, drowned or crushed in a stampede on a breakwater.

So ask a simple question: how many people are inside Ceuta this morning? Spanish authorities said about 2,500 in early August. Sánchez said around 5,000 at the end of the month, 1,200 of them children. The city’s own mayor said three to five thousand, then said it might be eight to eleven. Those are not different opinions about migration policy. They’re different answers to a counting problem in a Spanish city of eighty thousand people, and they came from the government, from the enclave and from the ministry that runs the returns.

A state that can’t say how many people it is currently housing has not lost an argument. It has lost track. Everything else in this column is downstream of that.

He already wrote the case for control himself

Look at the amnesty he defends, and look at what it actually requires. You have to show you were in Spain before 1 January 2026. You have to show you have no criminal convictions. Those are conditions, and conditions are a line, and somebody has to enforce the line or the paperwork means nothing.

Sánchez’s justification for regularisation was never open borders. It was the opposite: bring people into the formal economy so they pay into the welfare state, so they can be hired legally, so a landlord and a labour inspector both know who they’re dealing with. I find that argument persuasive. It is also, read honestly, an argument about the state knowing things, and a state that discovers seventy-two thousand arrivals in a weekend and then can’t count what’s left of them cannot deliver the thing he promised.

The critics aren’t attacking his amnesty from outside his logic. They’re pointing at the gap between his logic and his administration.

Blaming Russia and Israel is the tell

Sánchez told Cadena SER that networks tied to Russia and to Israel, along with the international far right, spread the rumours that pulled people to the beach. He said the EU’s diplomatic service had research indicating this. He offered no details.

Suppose it’s entirely true. What follows? A rumour that moves tens of thousands of people in forty-eight hours found something already primed to move, and the specific rumour was about a Spanish Supreme Court ruling, delivered on 8 July by Spain’s own judges, that summary returns don’t apply to people arriving by sea. That ruling was public. The smugglers read it. The government had three weeks.

Three weeks, and the response was a National Security Council convened in late August, after the fact, ahead of the first cabinet meeting back from the summer break.

Foreign disinformation is a real problem and Spain is a real target. It is also, right now, doing a job in Spanish politics that it shouldn’t be asked to do, which is explaining why the Interior Ministry was surprised by something published in a court judgment a month earlier.

What I still won’t grant his critics

Twenty-two European leaders signed a letter at Spain over this, and several of them run borders that only look orderly because someone else is paid to hold the line further south. Meloni’s Italy is not a model of anything. Sweden’s warning that regularisation endangers Schengen is a warning about Sweden’s politics as much as Spain’s.

I don’t accept that migrants as a group are a security problem, I don’t accept that the amnesty caused the breakwater, and I don’t accept the American commentary treating Ceuta as proof that Europe is dying. That framing was written before the crossing happened and would have been published whatever the facts turned out to be.

But refusing the framing is not the same as answering the question, and the question is still sitting there unanswered: who is in Ceuta, under what status, and what happens next to the twelve hundred children?

Sánchez has spent a month explaining who is to blame for the rumour. He hasn’t spent an hour explaining who is in the city.