Madrid \u2013 Just when Pedro Sanchez thought he had weathered domestic pressure over Spain\u2019s wild blazes, a shock migrant crisis left him facing political fire from Europe and the United States.<\/p>\n
Lacking a majority in parliament and facing elections next year, the 54-year-old Socialist prime minister responded to wildfires near Madrid by appealing for unity in curbing human-driven climate change.<\/p>\n
Within days, a fresh political challenge erupted, with tens of thousands of migrants pouring into Spain\u2019s north African territory of Ceuta, alarming his European allies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think his handling of the fires affected the prime minister\u2019s image,\u201d as opposition-run regions were responsible for fire prevention, said Paloma Roman, a political scientist at Madrid\u2019s Complutense University.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the migrant crisis \u2014 that has put it much more in doubt. They themselves said they didn\u2019t see it coming… that\u2019s very negative for the government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanchez \u2014 a figurehead for some progressives internationally \u2014 will see his government put on the spot Tuesday by EU ministers.<\/p>\n
They will hold an emergency meeting over the 50,000 or more migrants who rushed into Ceuta \u2014 images of whom were widely shared online by far-right groups.<\/p>\n
The crisis prompted Donald Trump\u2019s U.S. administration to accuse Madrid of enabling irregular migration.<\/p>\n
Images of flames ravaging tens of thousands of hectares and forcing whole villages to evacuate dominated the news for days from July 23.<\/p>\n
A week later, they were replaced by scenes of migrants swimming around the border barrier between Morocco and Ceuta and running into the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are crises of a different nature,\u201d said Mariam Martinez-Bascunan, a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Madrid.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fires stem from a structural climate emergency, while the other is a form of coercion linked to Morocco,\u201d which some commentators said may have used the migrants for diplomatic pressure on Spain, she said.<\/p>\n
Almost all of the roughly 50,000 migrants who entered Ceuta irregularly last week have since returned to Morocco.<\/p>\n
But their brief entrance sparked broad alarm among Sanchez\u2019s political rivals and strained relations within the European Union.<\/p>\n
The European right and far right, led by Italy\u2019s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, accused him of laxity at the borders.<\/p>\n
Meloni\u2019s government, led by her far-right party, suspended visa-free travel with Spain \u2014 although Ceuta is not part of the EU\u2019s open-border zone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the Ceuta crisis reveals is not that Pedro Sanchez has personal enemies within the EU, but something far more serious,\u201d said Martinez-Bascunan.<\/p>\n
\u201cCeuta has shown that the European world is falling apart … because everyone retreats to their own interests whenever a crisis proves useful to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a general election due in 2027, the conservative main opposition Popular Party (PP) and far-right Vox seized on the Ceuta crisis as an opportunity to shift the fight against Sanchez \u201conto the international stage,\u201d Roman said.<\/p>\n
Under Sanchez, who has resisted Trump over the Iran war and challenged Israel over the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, \u201cforeign policy has carried far more weight than under previous governments,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeyond the PP and Vox, he also has powerful adversaries on the international stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
The twin summer crises followed several difficult months for Sanchez on the domestic front, with several corruption scandals implicating his family and party.<\/p>\n
Roman of the Complutense University said the Ceuta crisis \u201cserved as fuel\u201d for the PP and Vox.<\/p>\n
Regarding the fires, political scientist Fernando Vallespin, a former head of the public polling body CIS, pointed out that the PP governs the regions worst affected by the recent fires.<\/p>\n
In voters\u2019 minds, \u201cthe PP therefore appears implicated as possibly jointly responsible for the neglect of rural areas,\u201d he said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Madrid \u2013 Just when Pedro Sanchez thought he had weathered domestic pressure over Spain\u2019s wild blazes, a shock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3299,3593,2264,205,21207,17,12315],"class_list":["post-65447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-ceuta","tag-migrants","tag-morocco","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-refugees","tag-spain","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65447","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=65447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}