“A border is not just a line on a map. It is the expression of a political community that decides which values it protects and which responsibilities it shares. When a European border is violated, all of Europe is weaker. When a border is not properly defended, all of Europe is left unprotected. That is what is happening.” This is how Alberto Núñez Feijóo summarizes his diagnosis of the Ceuta crisis, in an article published this Thursday in Politico, the reference media on community affairs in Brussels.
The article, titled “Europe must now solve the disaster caused by the Spanish Government in Ceuta,” calls on the EU to push Pedro Sánchez’s Executive towards a faster solution, so that the crisis does not “become entrenched.” “Given the time elapsed and the worsening episodes of violence in Ceuta, all of Europe must recognize the failure of the Spanish Government and exert the appropriate pressure so that this crisis does not become entrenched, does not spread, and does not repeat,” writes the leader of the Spanish opposition.
This move by Feijóo is part of his strategy of “Europeanizing the Ceuta crisis”, since Pedro Sánchez himself has acknowledged that the crisis, with thousands of immigrants still in the autonomous city, will not be resolved until December. And the PP believes that not even then, unless there is a very strong bureaucratic “acceleration.”
Feijóo will meet this Thursday, at the Congress of Deputies, with the Migration Commissioner, Magnus Brunner, and will travel this Monday to the town along with the president of the European PP, Manfred Weber, and wants the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who has been very clear in her defense of Ceuta, to also go.
He said so in an interview with EL MUNDO on Sunday: “If I were the Prime Minister, I would tell Von der Leyen and the Defense Commissioner to accompany me to Ceuta.” “The whole EU must know that Ceuta is as important as Greenland,” he added, referring to the fact that the Commission President did visit that territory earlier this month.
For Feijóo, the EU must respond in Ceuta just as it did when affected by other “hybrid” threats, such as those suffered in energy, trade, and information. “The attack on our southern border now demands the same determination as then,” he emphasizes in his article. Why? Because “we are not witnessing a usual migration crisis, but the consequences of an invasion coming from Morocco, which must therefore be held responsible for having allowed or instigated it.”
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The prolonged situation, in the eyes of the PP president, affects “the credibility of the European project to guarantee its own stability.” That is why Feijóo invokes the Migration and Asylum Pact, which implies that “those who have entered irregularly must return. All of them.” “The obligation of the Spanish Government is not to find them accommodation, but to speed up their departure,” he adds.
That is why he calls on the EU to take action so that “Spain applies, with the necessary intensity and agility, all the European instruments that would allow the return.” “I believe it is in the interest of the entire European Union to defend that it is not weakened by the instrumentalization of migratory flows or by questioning the Spanishness of Ceuta and Melilla, territories as European as Berlin, Paris, or Brussels,” Feijóo emphasizes. “Now, it is our turn to defend Ceuta, Spain, Europe,” he concludes his article.
In the same vein, Ester Muñoz, spokesperson for the PP in the Congress of Deputies, has called for “firmness” from the EU and described as “incredible,” on El programa de Ana Rosa, “to think that from Spain the Spanish Socialist group is influencing other European socialists not to support Ceuta and therefore not to support Spain and the EU.”
Muñoz has denounced that “a month and a half later, the Government still does not know how many irregular immigrants there are, nor how many minors.” It is “incredible” and “unthinkable” that the Government “does not know how to provide figures and when it is unable to provide solutions and solve the problem, it attacks everyone,” she added.
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