In Ceuta, the far right’s ‘clash of civilisations’ met a city that lives coexistence

By MNTV Staff Writer

When tens of thousands of people surged across the border from Morocco into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the end of July, Europe’s far right saw an opportunity. Here, seemingly on cue, was the “invasion” it had spent years warning about: a mass of predominantly Muslim, mostly Moroccan migrants overwhelming a European territory in a matter of hours. 

The crisis, the movement’s leaders declared, had vindicated everything they had been saying.

What followed instead became an unexpected illustration of the far right’s limits — and of how quickly a border emergency can be recast as a war on Islam, only to be rejected by the very community it claims to speak for.

Language of invasion

The dominant voice was that of Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, who seized on the crossings with characteristic intensity. 

He described the events as an “invasion” and, according to reporting by El Constitucional, called on Spaniards to expel migrants “by whatever means necessary” while demanding the permanent militarisation of the enclave. 

He blamed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez directly, casting him not merely as negligent but as the crisis’s “promoter.”

Visiting the city days later, Abascal accused the Spanish government of being subservient to Morocco, arguing that Rabat had acted in the belief that Madrid would offer no response or reprisal because Sánchez was, in his words, beholden to the North African kingdom.

But Abascal’s framing, as the outlet The New Arab noted, extended well beyond the defence of Spain’s borders. 

A long-standing critic of Muslim immigration, he has previously questioned Muslims’ place in Spanish society, called for suspending the process of acquiring Spanish nationality for immigrants descended from “Islamic countries,” and asserted that Islam cannot coexist in Spain. The Ceuta crisis became, in his hands, less an argument about border management than a confirmation of civilisational incompatibility.

Vox’s regional figures amplified the offensive. 

The party’s president in Ceuta, Juan Sergio Redondo, blamed Sánchez, the interior minister, and the enclave’s own president for what he called a foretold catastrophe. 

Party deputies in the Ceuta Assembly, according to El Constitucional, cheered as insults — “traitor,” “scoundrel,” and worse — were hurled at Sánchez during his visit, and the prime minister was met with jeers and homophobic chanting at the heliport, prompting police to intervene.

Crisis built partly on falsehoods

Much of the far right’s case rested on claims that do not survive scrutiny.

Abascal and others tied the crossings to an “extraordinary regularisation” of migrants approved by the Spanish government, presenting it as the direct cause of the influx. 

But as the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) documented, that programme provided one-year residence and work authorisation — not nationality — to people who had arrived in Spain before January 2026 and could prove five months of continuous residence. 

Its application window ran from mid-April to June 30, closing a full month before anyone entered the water at Ceuta, and those who crossed fell entirely outside its terms.

The distortion travelled internationally. 

CEPS noted that Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, wrongly claimed Madrid had granted Spanish — and therefore European — citizenship to more than 500,000 irregular migrants, and that Spain’s mainstream conservative Partido Popular joined in, with its secretary-general suggesting nobody could be surprised that people wanted to enter a country that regularises a million people “overnight.” 

The falsehoods, in other words, were not confined to the fringe; they were laundered upward into the European mainstream.

There were also serious questions about Morocco’s role — CEPS and others pointed to the easing of Moroccan border controls just days after Sánchez visited Algeria, Rabat’s regional rival, with some testimony and video appearing to show Moroccan authorities escorting people toward the enclave. 

But that dimension, concerning the cynical use of migrants as diplomatic leverage between states, was largely ignored by a far right more interested in the religion of those crossing than the geopolitics that may have propelled them.

Islamophobia at core

What distinguished the far-right reaction from ordinary anxiety about a border emergency was the speed with which it collapsed the distinction between migrants and Muslims — including Ceuta’s own Muslim citizens, Spaniards who have lived in the enclave for generations.

Ceuta is one of the oldest sites of Muslim-Christian coexistence in European-administered territory, a Spanish possession since 1580 with a large, long-settled population of Moroccan heritage. 

Yet Vox’s vision for the city, as Al Jazeera has previously reported, has long included replacing its border fencing with what one of its Ceuta representatives called an “unbreachable, impenetrable” wall against what she described as “the invasion from Africa.” 

The party has built real support in the enclave, and the crisis offered a chance to convert that into something larger.

City pushes back

The remarkable turn came when the far right tried to take its campaign to Ceuta’s streets — and the city refused it.

On August 2, far-right groups called an anti-migrant demonstration in the enclave. According to an account published by Naked Capitalism, agitators including figures from Spain’s neofascist fringe announced they would arrive with thousands to “defend their country,” using the language of an “act of war.” 

Most turned up at least two days late, after the peak of the crisis had already passed — and were met not with a grateful population but with open hostility from Ceuta’s own residents. 

They were heckled, mocked, and ultimately driven out of the city to chants of “racists and Islamophobes out,” “you’re coming here to sow hate,” and “Ceuta united.”

The New Arab framed the episode as Ceuta rejecting the far right’s anti-migrant agenda outright — a city whose lived experience of coexistence proved more durable than the narrative of civilisational conflict being imposed on it from outside. 

Counter-protesters, drawn from the enclave’s diverse communities, gathered specifically to oppose the far-right demonstration, invoking a shared history and attachment to the land that predated the political movements now seeking to divide them.

Pattern across continent

Ceuta was not an isolated flashpoint but the latest instance of a well-documented strategy. 

Academic research on the 2021 Ceuta and 2022 Melilla border crises — including work by José Javier Olivas Osuna analysing parliamentary discourse — has traced how Vox systematically frames such incidents to fuel a politics of “re-bordering,” converting humanitarian tragedies into narratives of national threat and civilisational defence. 

Each crisis becomes, in the researchers’ framing, “a fence of opportunity.”

The mechanism is consistent across Europe: a genuine border emergency provides the raw material, which is then stripped of context — the economic desperation driving young Moroccans facing 37 percent youth unemployment, the diplomatic manoeuvring between Madrid and Rabat, the legal facts of any regularisation scheme — and reassembled into a story about Islam overwhelming the West. 

Italy’s Tajani, Spain’s PP, and Vox’s counterparts elsewhere each played their part in amplifying the frame.

What Ceuta showed

The enclave’s rejection of the far right does not mean the strategy failed everywhere. Vox has grown from 50,000 votes a decade ago into one of Spain’s most powerful political forces, with particularly deep support in Ceuta itself, and the falsehoods spread during the crisis reached audiences far beyond the city. The broader European current — of parties converting migration into a referendum on Muslim belonging — continues to rise.

But for a few days on Europe’s southern frontier, the movement’s central claim was tested against reality and found wanting. A city that actually lives the coexistence the far right insists is impossible looked at the agitators who came to speak for it and told them to leave.