Pedro Sánchez’s migration policy is part of the past for the heart of Europe. The letter from 22 signatories requesting more border control and fewer measures that could cause a pull effect has left the Spanish government alone in Brussels. Meanwhile, the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla are trying to recover a normality that already coexists with the feeling of extreme vulnerability to the whims of Morocco. After eight years in power, the Europe Sánchez arrived at as president no longer resembles the current one at all.
What has changed in the Union’s migration policy? To answer, one must travel back 11 years, to the Aegean Sea. On September 2, 2015, photographer Nilüfer Demir captured on a beach in Bodrum (Turkey) the body of a two-year-old boy drowned while trying to cross by boat to the Greek island of Kos. He was traveling with his Kurdish family, fleeing the war en route to Canada; his mother and brother Ghalib also died. His name was Aylan Kurdi.
That image was the emotional trigger for a 180-degree turn. It became the symbol of the crisis and gave it a humanitarian dimension: almost all European governments (except Hungary and Poland) changed their stance, and in less than a month, commitments to reception multiplied. It came at the right moment: just a few days after Merkel pronounced her “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it). Europe opened wide to Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis.
In a few months, however, that open-minded mentality began to change due to several factors. First, the feeling of loss of control: images of crowds on the Balkan route caused distress as it seemed ungovernable. Then, the narrative associating migration with insecurity crystallized in the Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) attacks, some of whose perpetrators had infiltrated through migration routes.
The decisive blow in Germany was New Year’s Eve in Cologne: a series of mass sexual assaults mostly attributed to men of foreign origin that De Maizière, Interior Minister, defined as the turning point in the refugee debate, and which preceded the decisive breakthrough of the ultra AfD party in three Länder in 2016. Years later, new attacks (Mannheim and Solingen, in 2024) would push Germany to toughen its policy and reactivate deportations.
The far right, previously marginal, came to set the tone, and the center adopted its discourse to avoid being overwhelmed. François Gemenne from HEC Paris sums it up: “If centrist leaders seem overwhelmed on these issues, they lose control of the narrative, so they feel compelled to show border firmness.” It is not just the right: from Frederiksen’s Denmark to Keir Starmer warning of the risk of a “stranger island,” the center-left has been left without a solid narrative.
Hybrid war
Added to this was the hybrid war. Belarus pushed families from the Middle East toward the Poland and Lithuania border in 2021; months earlier, Morocco had opened its Ceuta border in a manner similar to the current one. In this context, Europe has only allowed one exception: the massive reception of Ukrainians. Proximity weighed – a war on the EU border, with Russia as the aggressor – and an assumed affinity from the start: the political class treated Ukrainians as “Europeans like us.”
The model Europe wants to embrace today is no longer Merkel’s open-door policy that only Sánchez supports, but a more deterrent one, based on deporting undocumented migrants to third countries like Albania, although it has a difficult legal fit. Spain, on the other hand, has launched a regularization to which more than a million people applied.
Sánchez’s isolation is the result of two simultaneous movements: Europe sliding toward closure and Spain in a structural position where immigrants allow it to maintain economic growth. Toughening up ceased to be a right-wing issue to become a cross-cutting consensus. This is shown by the fact that the offensive against the Spanish model is co-written by Mette Frederiksen, a social democrat from the same European family as the PSOE, and not just Meloni or Merz. When 22 of the 27 sign a letter blaming the Spanish regularization for the pull effect, the narrative that “the far right” attacks it falls apart: it is also attacked by its own house.
The Syrian wave of 2015 barely touched Spain, which hosts very few refugees and never internalized the shock that hardened Germany, Sweden, or Denmark. Its immigration is mainly labor-related – Latin American and Moroccan – and feeds a market with a labor shortage. Spaniards have indeed changed their opinion in these eight years of Sánchez’s government: immigration rose to the top concern in the CIS, a turnaround that, sociologist Hein de Haas emphasizes, “reflects political discourse, not a real change in flows.”
Ceuta’s vulnerability makes its isolation visually devastating and allows its critics to link regularization to the avalanche. Something this Europe, that of 2026, fears much more than that of 2015.
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