Between shouts of “Pedro Sánchez, to prison!” and “Invaders, expulsion!”, several thousand people – 50,000, according to the Government Delegation – gathered this Wednesday late in the afternoon in front of the Madrid City Council, formally summoned to give their support to Ceuta after the crisis due to the massive entry of immigrants at the end of July. It was soon seen in the protest in the capital that it was not just about supporting the people of Ceuta, but about demonstrating against the President of the Government, to whom those gathered directed their anger for what happened, chanting "Pedro Sánchez, son of a bitch!" and asking that he be imprisoned. The Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP), which controls the PP, had called for rallies throughout the country, in which the right also demonstrated its ability to summon tens of thousands of people - about 25,000 in Valencia, 10,000 in Badalona or 20,000 in Ceuta itself, according to the corresponding Government delegations. Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal, leaders of the PP and Vox, who attended the Madrid protest together but without coinciding, toughened their offensive against the President of the Government, accusing him of “lying” to the Spanish and of being a “lackey” of Morocco and “a traitor” to Spain.
The Madrid protest, the largest, began with some incidents with journalists covering the rally, rebuked by several protesters, and also ended with episodes of tension, with the police having to disperse with tear gas and rubber balls a group of a few hundred people who, after Cibeles, continued their march to Congress amid shouts of "Long live Spain!" and “Ceuta is not for sale!” Four protesters ended up arrested, two of them minors, and four police officers were injured in the altercations in front of Congress. The riot police of the National Police also had to intervene between a group with Spanish flags, coming from the Cibeles concentration, and another that supported an anti-racist march in which the Podemos leaders Irene Montero and Ione Belarra participated. At the Valencia rally, some protesters burned images of Pedro Sánchez and the king of Morocco amid shouts against Muslims: “Spain, Christian, non-Muslim,” “Muslim who doesn't vote” or “I know, Pedro, your boyfriend is Mohamed.”
Although they participated in the same protest, Feijóo and Abascal avoided greeting each other and meeting in the same space. The leader of Vox, who arrived first near Madrid City Hall amid shouts of "president, president!", left shortly after speaking to the media among a scrum of supporters with signs that read "No to the invasion. Defend Ceuta. Defend Spain." Abascal was thus the first to shoot against Sánchez, whom he portrayed as a servile president before Morocco and asked that he be tried for treason. "We are in the hands of a lackey government that acts at the service of a foreign government. We are in the hands of a traitor who serves the interests of the enemies of Spain from the minute he was elected," launched the Vox leader.
Abascal maintained that “Pedro Sánchez's permanence in power is a real threat not only to the democratic system, to free elections,” but also “to national sovereignty, today in the hands of foreign governments, and to the territorial integrity of Spain, threatened especially in Ceuta and Melilla by Pedro Sánchez's masters.” And he once again demanded that the socialist leader be tried for treason, since "the invasion [of Ceuta] is part of the hybrid war that Morocco promotes against Spain with the encouragement, with the help, with the complicity and with the silence at this moment of the president of the government of Spain, who is a traitor."
Feijóo arrived later, accompanied by the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, and the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, from Ceuta, where he had been in the morning with the president of Ceuta. Only the mayor of the capital and his government team went up to the stage that the City Council had placed in front of the Plaza de Cibeles, from where Almeida read a manifesto from the Federation of Municipalities and Provinces in support of Ceuta. "Ceuta is not alone. Ceuta: you are and will always be Spain," Almeida read in an institutional tone, while the protesters asked for more beer and interrupted him with chants against Sánchez and "We want to vote!".
Feijóo did not speak at the event, but he later approached journalists and also launched a frontal challenge against Sánchez. “A Spanish city has been invaded, it has been occupied, and unfortunately it has been done with the knowledge of the Government of Spain,” said the PP leader. "We will know why they invaded Ceuta, we will know who consented to it, we will know who promoted it and, of course, we already know who lied to us. And who lied to us, with the police reports in hand, has been the entire Council of Ministers and the president of the government. It is an unprecedented fact in our history. And it is an unprecedented fact to have a Government that has lied to all citizens about something as fundamental as our integrity and our sovereignty."
Although they avoided the joint photo, the two leaders of the right joined forces and exhibited a unity of action that they had not shown for a long time against the left, despite the fact that at the same time they compete with each other to capitalize on the social unrest due to the crisis.
The right has achieved a show of force in the streets due to the crisis in Ceuta with which they increase the pressure against the Government, which is already in a very delicate situation at the appearance of the president this Thursday in Congress, after the controversy over the report that the National Police has delivered to the judge and which indicates, according to what was published, that Moroccan agents directed the massive entry of people to Ceuta with a purpose other than immigration. That report gave the Popular Party the perfect ammunition to insist on the message it had been sending for days: that the Executive did know what was going to happen on July 30 and that it has tried to hide that Rabat was behind the incident. "The Government knew it and covered it up. It has lied to our faces. Hiding the warnings and ignoring them," the PP leader from Ceuta accused La Moncloa in the morning, on his third visit since the beginning of the crisis. The leader of the popular party blamed Morocco for having “coordinated” the entry operation of between 70,000 and 80,000 people into the autonomous city, and demanded that hostility with the neighboring country be raised by summoning the Moroccan ambassador in Spain and calling the Spanish ambassador in the Alawite kingdom for consultations.
The Popular Party tried to present the mobilizations as “non-partisan” and exclusively in support of Ceuta, with the aim of stirring up the contradictions of the PSOE mayors, after Ferraz urged his federations not to participate due to their “instrumentalization” against the Government, but Vox made it clear from the beginning that their purpose in the protests was to demonstrate “against the criminal Government.” In the chants and banners of those who gathered in Cibeles it was also clear that, although initially presented as a mobilization without acronyms or ideologies, the protest had attracted support especially from the right. PP and Vox also heated up the call by accusing the Government of trying to “boycott” it because the Government Delegation had accused the Madrid City Council of a formal defect in its communication of the protest, but making it clear that it could be held. Feijóo insisted until the end that the Executive had tried to torpedo it, despite the fact that it was held normally.
