Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez appeared to criticize King Felipe VI on Monday over his lack of involvement in the ongoing migration crisis in Ceuta, chiding the monarch for his failure to visit the city. It is highly unusual for members of the Spanish government to publicly challenge the Crown’s actions. Yet Sánchez’s statement hinted at his frustration with the head of state’s absence from the Ceuta response, which he contrasted with his own emergency visit to the city, and his government’s on-the-ground handling of the still unresolved crisis.
How many times has he gone to Ceuta and Melilla? Not once.” Sánchez’s statement was technically incorrect: Felipe VI has only been on the throne since 2014. The prime minister appeared to be referring to former King Juan Carlos I’s five-hour visit to Ceuta in 2007 — the last time a Spanish head of state visited the city.
The only other Spanish heads of state known to have visited were King Alfonso XIII, who traveled there in 1927, and President of the Second Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, who visited Ceuta in 1933. While declining to “share the content of the conversations I have with the head of state,” Sánchez emphasized he had recommended the king travel to the city. He said a royal visit would happen but declined to say when, noting it depended on “there being the conditions for it to happen.” In the past, Spain’s kings have played an important role in the country’s interactions with Morocco.
Juan Carlos I had a deep personal friendship with the late King Hassan II of Morocco, and was frequently called upon to handle back-channel negotiations when Madrid and Rabat clashed. But Felipe VI is not known to have a similarly close relationship with Morocco’s current monarch, Mohammed VI. According to the Sánchez government, Spain’s king was asked to call his counterpart in Rabat in the immediate aftermath of the crisis but declined to do so.
Both the Spanish government and EU officials previously stated that nearly all of the unauthorized migrants who had crossed into Ceuta had returned to Morocco within just a few days, but Sánchez on Monday said that around 5,000 remain in the Spanish semi-exclave. Over the past week, clashes have broken out throughout the city. Several migrants have been arrested for attacking members of the Spanish military, and Spanish police had to intervene to protect migrants after a group of locals set fire to the improvised shelters set up on one of Ceuta’s beaches.
Sánchez expressed solidarity with Ceuta’s residents and said he was confident normality would soon be restored. He compared the current situation to previous mass entries of migrants into the Canary Islands in 2020 and 2021, which he said the government had been able to handle. The prime minister said that in the coming weeks, the approximately 1,200 unaccompanied minors who entered the city would be relocated to shelters on the Iberian Peninsula.
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