CEUTA: THE MIGRATION WEAPON

Images straight out of The Camp of the Saints, the much-maligned novel by Jean Raspail (1925–2020).

As in that book, loathed by right-thinking minds and published 53 years ago (!), 60,000 young men, often adolescents, barefoot, many of them wearing nothing more than a swimsuit, literally overwhelmed, in the space of just a few hours, the small Spanish town of Ceuta, population 83,000, east of Tangier. The images of these young men running in every direction, shouting their joy at having reached the endlessly fantasized “Europe,” immediately triggered a genuine wave of panic across the entire continent. In Madrid, a strained Pedro Sánchez, forgetting his legendary self-assurance, gravely announced that Spain was facing “an attack, a violation of its territorial integrity.”

Across Europe, the same fear could be felt everywhere: in Finland, in Denmark as in Italy, demands were made for Spain to be immediately excluded from the Schengen agreements. In Berlin, Chancellor Merz, adopting the tone of Europe’s boss, ordered his Spanish counterpart to “take matters back in hand as soon as possible.”

In Paris, Macron ordered reinforcements to the Spanish border, while offering his help — always the “at the same time” reflex — even proposing to mobilize Frontex, the embryonic border police force of the Union, thereby arrogating to himself, as he often does, powers he does not possess, since Frontex depends on a complex chain of command between the Commission and the Member States, not on the French president alone…

Fortunately, we learned the following day that 37,000 Moroccan “swimmers” had agreed to return home, the desired cooperation with Rabat having apparently borne fruit…

End of the episode, then. But not of the story.

The truth is that Africa — and the Maghreb countries in particular — has perfectly grasped the power conferred on it by demography and immigration in the face of an “Old Continent” which, alas, deserves that name a little more with every passing day.

To each his immigrants… and his problems.

For years, France has been losing its way in an interminable quid pro quo with Algeria, where Macron’s dream of “memorial reconciliation” comes up against Algiers’s permanent blackmail over visas. “Visas for 132 years,” President Tebboune even joked, alluding to the years of French presence in Algeria. The 250,000 annual visas recently mentioned by our illustrious ambassador in Algiers, the Algerian fits of anger invariably followed by French ministerial genuflections, the abandonment of the necessary denunciation of the 1968 agreement on the entry and residence of Algerians in France — all these are so many episodes in an unhealthy relationship, in which the Algerian undocumented migrants whom Algiers refuses to take back form part of the permanent punishment that the country presenting itself as the eternal victim of French colonization — “a crime against humanity,” according to Macron himself — intends to inflict on its tormentor…

Spain, for its part, knows perfectly well the sophisticated game the Moroccan Kingdom plays with it. In 1975, despite an ambiguous but rather unfavorable decision by the International Court of Justice regarding its sovereignty over Western Sahara, King Hassan II had the brilliant idea of conquering a territory not by using armed force, but by deploying a mass of 300,000 unarmed civilians, taking advantage of a dying Franco and the political paralysis of the former colonizer.

Spain yielded. Since then, with every episode of tension, the question of Spain’s colonial scraps on Moroccan soil has resurfaced: in July 2002, with Morocco’s attempt to occupy the islet of Persil, halted by the landing of Spanish commandos; in 2021, when Spain had the bad idea of receiving Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario, for medical treatment. Rabat’s response was immediate: 10,000 migrants entered Ceuta.

The latest episode: on July 20, 2026, the Spanish prime minister paid an official visit to Algiers — another bad idea. All the worse an idea since Sánchez is more than weakened domestically by an avalanche of corruption cases involving his own wife and close circle, since he is in open conflict with Trump over the war in Iran, and since Europe is worried about the mass regularization of illegal immigrants on Spanish soil, involving one million people. At the same time, Morocco has moved closer to Trump and Israel by signing the Abraham Accords, obtaining in return substantial military assistance, but above all Washington’s recognition of the “Moroccan character” of Western Sahara.

The retaliation, taking on the appearance of a new Green March, this time in aquatic form, was therefore not long in coming.

Sánchez tried to explain the invasion of Ceuta by pointing to a rumor spread by human-trafficking mafias. According to him, it was a decision by the Supreme Court of Andalusia, prohibiting the return of migrants who had arrived by swimming to Spanish shores, that mobilized the young people who reached Ceuta.

For anyone familiar with the efficiency of Morocco’s security services, it is doubtful that the concentration of several tens of thousands of young people at the border with Ceuta could have gone unnoticed…

In truth, what has just been demonstrated is the extraordinary power of the migration weapon. For Spain, the future of the colonial-era scraps that are Ceuta and Melilla is plainly compromised. Some Spanish experts even fear for the Canary Islands… As for Europe, demographically declining and without any real migration policy, this show of force sounds like a spectacular warning of what threatens to happen on its shores if, through an accumulation of petty cowardices, good intentions and impotence, we leave unanswered the challenge posed by an Africa which, by 2050, will reach 2.5 billion people, many of whom will seek a better life on this side of the Mediterranean.

Pierre Lellouche
31/7/26