European Union interior ministers will hold an emergency video conference on Tuesday to discuss last week’s events in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta. More than 60,000 Moroccans surged across the border, and although the majority have returned the invasion has traumatised many member states.
Who authorised him to speak on behalf of the West? And what hypocrisy to now criticise Italy and Denmark
Italy and Denmark initiated the meeting and soon had the support of twenty other EU countries. In a letter to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the 22 leaders declared: ‘We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our action, strengthening our external borders and addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors’.
They specifically referenced Spain’s decision earlier this year to regularize a ‘very large number of irregular migrants’.
The leaders of five countries refused to sign the letter: France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland.
It will be a small comfort to Spain’s beleaguered Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, that he still has a few friends in Europe and the fact one of them is Emmanuel Macron is of no great surprise. The pair are Socialists, and although the French president won power in 2017 claiming to be a centrist, nothing has exposed his left-wing bias more than his refusal to address mass immigration.
In June, Macron and Sanchez were the only EU leaders who opposed the Bloc’s vote for migrant ‘return hubs’. The law will accelerate the return of migrants with no legal right to remain in the EU, but it angered Macron who said ‘I am not sure that this is our Europe’. The French president also vowed to prevent EU money being used to build the deportation camps because they do not ‘correspond with our principles’.
Macron shares his ‘principles’ with Sanchez, not to mention their eyewatering arrogance. In February, Sanchez used an op-ed in the New York Times to justify his decision to regularize upwards of one million migrants. The column was headlined: ‘I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants’.
Who authorised him to speak on behalf of the West? And what hypocrisy to now criticise Italy and Denmark, labelling them at the weekend as ‘selfish’ and ‘unlawful’ because they oppose his open border policy.
It is no wonder Giorgia Meloni is making the most of the border breach at Ceuta. Italy goes to the polls next year and Meloni knows that the scenes in Spain will boost her standing more than they will her opponents. She has styled herself as Europe’s toughest leader on border control. Speculation is growing that she will call an election as early as April.
That is the month that France votes for their new president. Macron can’t run for a third consecutive term and he has done his social democratic Protégées no favours with his response to the Ceuta invasion.
Two of his former Prime Ministers, Gabriel Attal and Edouard Philippe are running on the centrist ticket and both are increasingly damned by association with their ex-boss. Philippe – seen by many as Le Pen’s strongest centrist opponent – tweeted at the weekend that the scenes in Ceuta were ‘serious and unacceptable’.
Le Pen retweeted Philippe’s remarks with a reminder that when he was PM (between 2017 and 2022) he granted 30 per cent more residence permits and 60 per cent more refugee permits year than under the Socialist government of François Hollande.
The leader of the National Rally used the same social media platform to explain what she will do if elected president: ‘Faced with the massive and coordinated influx of migrants into Spain, encouraged by the Spanish government, France must without delay strengthen controls at its borders,’ wrote Le Pen. ‘And in 2027, we will put an end to this madness by reserving Schengen free movement for EU nationals.’
One mainstream broadcaster has put the question of Schengen to its viewers in an online poll. To date, 98 per cent of respondents support Le Pen’s position.
Last week may well be the week when Le Pen won the presidential election. On Monday, a man stabbed three women in a Paris street, allegedly because ‘Allah sent me’. The authorities quickly closed down coverage of the atrocity and no further details have emerged about the attacker. Le Pen tweeted that ‘eradicating Islamism is a daily battle’ and attacks perpetrated in its name must not be ‘swept under the carpet to avoid naming the evil’.
Then came Ceuta. The images of tens of thousands of Moroccans swarming into Spanish territory were broadcast across the television networks in France. The French know that their country is the destination of choice for most Moroccans, whose legal community numbers 621,000; that is fewer than the 658,000 Algerians but more than the 312,00 Tunisians.
No one is sure how many people are in France illegally, but in 2022 the government admitted it could be as many as 900,000.
In that same year Meloni was elected prime minister of Italy, swept to power because she talked tough about controlling her country’s borders. Next year it could be the turn of another anti-immigration blonde to win office.
If Le Pen is elected president, centre-left Socialists like Macron and Sanchez will have only themselves to blame.
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