The Ceuta letter was written for a timeline, not for solidarity with Spain
On the letter from twenty-two heads of government, and why it concedes the argument it claims to be winning
The Ceuta letter argues against something that cannot have caused what happened.
Twenty-two heads of government, led by Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen, name Spain’s mass regularisation as a pull factor. That scheme required presence in Spain before 1 January 2026 and closed to applications on 30 June. Nobody who crossed at Ceuta this week was eligible. Not one. Spain’s foreign ministry has said so plainly, and the arithmetic is not in dispute. The letter also records that no unauthorised onward movements took place. Border control was restored inside 48 hours, and almost everyone who entered has gone back.
A cause that could not have operated. A consequence that did not occur.
What is left is the vocabulary of instrumentalisation wrapped around the premises of the far right. The letter names hybrid threats in one paragraph and mass regularisation in the next, as though these were two halves of one argument. They are not. The first says a foreign actor opened a border. The second says Spain invited people through it. The letter wants both, because the second is what plays on social media.
Pedro Sánchez has replied that the reaction is driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance or political interest. Strong words. They are also hard to answer.
Spain is fighting wildfires that have killed at least twelve people, with more still missing, while tens of thousands crossed at Ceuta and dozens died in the attempt. Meloni and Frederiksen might have picked up the telephone. Instead there is a letter, drafted at speed and published by the Italian government within hours, asking for an extraordinary meeting of interior ministers. Sánchez had already asked for one. France and Portugal, Spain’s neighbours, did not sign. Nor did Luxembourg.
The trap
The trap is to argue about borders and migration rather than about the instrumentalisation of people by actors outside Europe.
We have seen earlier versions of it. Timothy Snyder argues in The Road to Unfreedom that Russia worked to amplify the crisis of 2015. In 2021 Lukashenko engineered flows towards the Polish and Lithuanian borders. In the same year, Morocco eased its controls at Ceuta after Madrid admitted Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, for medical treatment.
Whether Rabat’s controls held this week, at the moment they mattered, is precisely what a common European assessment should establish. It is not what the letter asks about. The letter asks about Spain.
What is new is the amplification
X is tuned by Elon Musk to promote his political views and the parties he backs in Europe. Part of that agenda is the claim that asylum seekers and Muslims are dismantling European society and its culture. Meta has taken down its own defences against hate speech, and the hateful comment has accelerated accordingly.
Look at what was directed at MEP Abir Al-Sahlani after she called out the “send them back” chants in the chamber, and at the fact that the worst of it came from a fellow member. Kristoffer Hjort Storm told her to go home. She was born in Iraq, learned the language, took citizenship and was elected to the European Parliament. She has filed a complaint with the Swedish police.
A letter assembled inside twenty-four hours, before heads of government had done any geopolitical analysis, is a document written for that environment. It reads less as solidarity with a member state under pressure than as a reaction to a timeline.
Inventing a rule
Italy has suspended Schengen rules with Spain and closed its air and sea borders. Denmark and Finland say the EU should consider the same. Andrej Babiš has gone further and called for the suspension of Spain’s membership.
There is no mechanism for suspending a member state from Schengen. This is not a rule being invoked. It is a rule being invented.
And the framework under attack has been hollowed out for years. Several member states have run “temporary” internal border controls without interruption since 2015, reauthorised every six months, under a provision written for exceptional and short-lived circumstances. The states now demanding that Spain be held to the external border regime are the states that quietly abandoned the internal one.
Where this leaves the centre and the left
The Meloni–Frederiksen duo is the demonstration. A leader of the hard right and a Social Democrat sign the same text, and the text is the right’s. This is what it looks like when the centre-left adopts the policies of the far right: not a defeat at the ballot box, but a joint letterhead.
The centre and the left have to answer, but not on ground chosen by the far right. The answer to pressure on the external border is support for the Spanish government. Governments cannot afford to look as though they do not control their borders. That is a real constraint, and pretending otherwise is not an argument. But nor can they abandon a rights-based system, in which migration is organised around obligations agreed in international conventions.
Those conventions were drafted after the genocide of the Second World War. They are a pillar of the legal order Europe built out of that experience, written by people who knew what happens when a state decides that some human beings fall outside the law. Most refugees never reach Europe at all. They live in countries neighbouring the one they fled.
The risk is not that the centre loses a vote. The risk is that it enters the argument without secure foundations and gets swept along, adopting the rhetoric of the right and then its policies, rather than challenging either.
Argue on the premises of the far right, amplified by algorithms built for outrage, and the argument is lost before it starts.
First, the rhetoric is adopted. Then the policies.