Twenty-two European Union leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, slammed Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Saturday following the Ceuta crisis, which they said undermined the security of the regional bloc.

Amid the backlash, the Spanish premier hit back against his EU partners, calling them “selfish” when addressing the sudden influx of around 50,000 unauthorised migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa. While almost all of the migrants have now returned to Morocco, the 22 leaders still raised “serious concern” over the threat to the EU’s frontier, and zeroed in on Sánchez’s move to grant legal status to up to 1.2 million unauthorised migrants as a “pull factor” that fueled the crisis.

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In a letter to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, the 22 leaders made direct reference to the need for EU-level cooperation on policies such as Madrid’s migrant regularisation scheme.

“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, such as the regularisation of [a] very large number of irregular migrants,” the leaders wrote in the letter.

Spain defends itself

Madrid pushed back against these claims and said that the country’s regularisation scheme triggered the crisis in Ceuta, and has pointed out that none of the people who illegally entered the exclave would be eligible to benefit from the measure.

“This process is based on very specific conditions, such as proof of residency in Spain before January 1, 2026, and having resided in Spain for five consecutive months at the time of application,” said a spokesperson for the Spanish foreign ministry. Moreover, the deadline for filing applications for the scheme, which was launched in April, was in June.

However, even these explanations didn’t satisfy the EU leaders. “We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into a legal stay,” they said in the letter.

Apart from Merz and Meloni, the letter was signed by the leaders of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden.

Sanchez calls his counterparts ‘selfish’

In his own letter to von der Leyen, Costa and Martin, Sánchez slammed his European counterparts. He insisted that they “have chosen to attack Spain and to call for its temporary exclusion from the Schengen Area.”

According to Politico, Spain’s Socialist prime minister said that calls to have Spain kicked out of the Schengen zone are “not only contrary to European law, humanitarian law, and the principles of solidarity that bind us together,” but also “Europe’s long-term interests and to the most basic common sense.”

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He emphasised that this was not the first time migrants had been weaponised against the bloc’s members, and recalled Belarus’ 2021 bid to sow chaos in the EU by facilitating migrant crossings into Poland and several Baltic countries. “In the current international context, the European Union cannot afford this kind of selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction,” he wrote. Overall, the Ceuta crisis has stirred tensions among the bloc.