If you keep up with international affairs (for example, by reading this blog) you find that events often repeat themselves, sometimes with long dormant periods. So it seemed with the weekend’s big European story, the breakdown of border control in the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta, which resulted in something like 60,000 people crossing from Morocco – almost all of whom have now gone back again.
This looked a lot like a rerun of a story from 2021, when much the same thing happened (but with a smaller number, some 8,000). What I said then still stands:
The efforts of the EU to close its doors on the poor and the persecuted of Africa and the Middle East, most of them from countries that have been devastated over the years by European colonialism, are deplorable. And it’s particularly hard to summon up sympathy for Spain given its constant complaints about Gibraltar, when it’s guilty of the same imperialist caper on the opposite side of the strait.
But this is not a case of desperate people spontaneously deciding to take their chance at a better life in Europe. Morocco controls the access to its side of the border; if large numbers cross into Ceuta, it’s because the Moroccan government wants them to. It orchestrated the 2021 movement in retaliation for Spanish opposition to Moroccan imperialism in Western Sahara, and now it has done the same thing on a larger scale.
In other words, Spain is under attack: not from would-be immigrants, but from what one might fairly call (to borrow Hillary Clinton’s term) “a vast right-wing conspiracy”. As the only remaining left-wing leader among the major powers of the European Union, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez is a key hate figure for the Trump administration, not to mention the Israeli government and far-right parties throughout Europe.
It’s not just about punishing Sánchez for a range of geopolitical sins – his support for the Palestinians, his forthright opposition to the war on Iran and his friendly relations with Algeria, Western Sahara’s main supporter – in the hope of undermining him in advance of elections due within the next year. It’s also about returning the issue of immigration to the headlines, trying to inflame hatred against the dark-skinned hordes supposedly threatening white civilisation.
Hence Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, under threat from rivals further to the right, has seized on the issue to suspend co-operation with Spain under the Schengen agreement. Never mind that Ceuta is only notionally part of Schengen and that Spain has no border with Italy anyway: it’s a political move, not an actual immigration problem. And various other European leaders have joined in the anti-immigrant chorus.
But as I’ve argued before, mainstream leaders who dial up the rhetoric against immigration are cutting their own throats. It’s true that Sánchez, who is about the closest thing to a liberal on immigration issues that the EU can now boast, is badly under water in his poll ratings; YouGov’s tracker in June gave him an approval rating of negative thirty points. But it’s not as if his more hard-line counterparts are doing any better: Keir Starmer was at minus 46, Emmanuel Macron at minus 56 and Germany’s Friedrich Merz the worst of the lot at minus 64.
And it’s worth pointing out that in none of these places does the far right have anything like majority support. Taking the most recent figures from Politico’s poll of polls, Spain’s Vox is on 17%, Britain’s Reform and Restore Britain have 27%, France’s National Rally has 34%, Germany’s AfD has 28%. Even in Italy, where the far right is in government, its feuding components total only 40%. (More about Italy later this week.)
These are disturbing numbers, but they do not represent an unstoppable movement. The materials are there for a pushback against the anti-immigrant narrative if only mainstream politicians can muster the will for it. Certainly what they’re doing now isn’t working.
The World is Not Enough 