How Spain's migrant crisis is emboldening the hard right

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Jon Lewis** (0:05)
The extraordinary images that we saw over the course of the weekend, with 50,000 to 60,000 migrants storming the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, has shaken and sent shockwaves across the EU itself.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:18)
Spain recently passed a law which makes it essentially more difficult to send back returning migrants.

**Jon Lewis** (0:26)
More than anything, as we can see in terms of the reaction to this, this is a political problem.

**Donald Trump** (0:30)
When I saw what happened in Spain, I said, you know, we had a version of that.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:34)
This is really where this all takes us, for the parties of the far right and the hard right to say Europe doesn't understand immigration.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:42)
This summer I have prepared a playlist with some of the songs that I have been listening The first one is Quevedo el Baifo, the second one is Spring Summer 26 by Charly XCX.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:56)
That is the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, wishing everyone a happy summer, and taking us through his summer playlist on Spotify. He may very well be regretting that video now, because he finds himself isolated by many of the European countries over what is happening on Spain's border with Morocco. Thousands, tens of thousands of migrants coming through Africa into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and Spain not doing enough to control it.
Welcome to The News Agents.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:40)
The News Agents.

**Emily Maitlis** (1:42)
It's Maitlis.

**Jon Lewis** (1:43)
It's Lewis. Those extraordinary images, the videos that just went everywhere on social media at the weekend, of between 50,000 to 60,000 people storming the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, has shaken and sent shockwaves across the EU itself. It has led to, as we were saying at the top there, this war of words really between different European governments, many of which focusing their fire firmly on Pedro Sanchez's socialist Spanish government, the EU holding an urgent meeting of Interior Ministers today amid those divisions.
Basically, this is all about whether everyone can agree within the EU, and this is a recurring theme over the years in European migration policy. Everyone agrees that a fundamental pillar of the European project is freedom of movement within the bloc. But what does that mean for its external border? Because of course, once you're in and you're into the Schengen area, the passport-free travel zone, which Soutar is not in, but obviously Spain itself is, then that puts tremendous pressure if you have one of these migratory waves, which we saw obviously on a much bigger scale about 10 years ago after the Syrian Civil War, and all of the pressures that put on the EU. But basically, the governments from across Europe being led by Georgia Maloney's Italian government blaming internal Spanish immigration policy, including a sort of amnesty that they've given to hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants, illegal migrants over the past 12 months. Blaming them for in effect attracting these sorts of migratory waves, which of course once you're in, as I say, you don't necessarily have to stay in Spain, you can go elsewhere in the block.

**Emily Maitlis** (3:27)
Yeah. I think this incident, this future incident is probably the first major test of the EU's migration pact. That started in June, just a couple of months ago, after years really of negotiations aimed at creating these common migration rules and stronger unions solidarity between the member states. Just to go back a step, if you're wondering why on earth we're talking about Spain in Africa, it's something that actually takes you back 500 years or so. There are these two enclaves on the northeastern tip of Morocco, Ciutat Amalia, and they have belonged to Spain since the 1500s, since the colonial days, they actually predate modern Morocco.
They are extraordinary because, as you say Lewis, in a sense they're a gateway to the rest of Europe, but very firmly on the African mainland. And so they've become this sort of magnet for people, not just Moroccans, but anyone traveling up through Sub-Saharan Africa, thinking that if they can just get over the wall, over the fences, and you see, around Ciutat, there's very, very high barbed wire fences that separate Ciutat with the rest of Morocco, with all the villages and all the sort of towns of Morocco. And migrants are obviously thinking if we can just scale those barbed wire fences, scale those walls, or come in sort of over the coast to Ciutat, to Malia, then we have access to Spain.
And Ciutat, Malia, they're not part of Schengen. They don't allow instant free movement with no passport, but they do allow anyone who lands there on the beach or over the wall or climbing over the barbed wire, this chance then to start processing their papers in Spain.