Twenty-two European Union leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, slammed Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez on Saturday following the Ceuta crisis, which they said undermined the security of the regional bloc.<\/p>\n
Amid the backlash, the Spanish premier hit back against his EU partners, calling them \u201cselfish\u201d 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 \u201cserious concern\u201d over the threat to the EU\u2019s frontier, and zeroed in on S\u00e1nchez\u2019s move to grant legal status to up to 1.2 million unauthorised migrants as a \u201cpull factor\u201d that fueled the crisis.<\/p>\n
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In a letter to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Ant\u00f3nio Costa and Irish Prime Minister Miche\u00e1l Martin, the 22 leaders made direct reference to the need for EU-level cooperation on policies such as Madrid\u2019s migrant regularisation scheme.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d the leaders wrote in the letter.<\/p>\n
Spain defends itself<\/p>\n
Madrid pushed back against these claims and said that the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis 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,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
However, even these explanations didn\u2019t satisfy the EU leaders. \u201cWe 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\u2019s illegal entry can turn into a legal stay,\u201d they said in the letter.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sanchez calls his counterparts \u2018selfish\u2019<\/p>\n
In his own letter to von der Leyen, Costa and Martin, S\u00e1nchez slammed his European counterparts. He insisted that they \u201chave chosen to attack Spain and to call for its temporary exclusion from the Schengen Area.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Politico, Spain\u2019s Socialist prime minister said that calls to have Spain kicked out of the Schengen zone are \u201cnot only contrary to European law, humanitarian law, and the principles of solidarity that bind us together,\u201d but also \u201cEurope\u2019s long-term interests and to the most basic common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
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He emphasised that this was not the first time migrants had been weaponised against the bloc\u2019s members, and recalled Belarus\u2019 2021 bid to sow chaos in the EU by facilitating migrant crossings into Poland and several Baltic countries. \u201cIn the current international context, the European Union cannot afford this kind of selfish, polarising and unlawful reaction,\u201d he wrote. Overall, the Ceuta crisis has stirred tensions among the bloc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-two European Union leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, slammed Spanish Prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[25671,25997,333,25998,203,2264,205,17],"class_list":["post-64683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-ceuta-crisis","tag-eu-leaders","tag-european-union","tag-migrant-regularisation","tag-migration","tag-morocco","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}