Pedro Sánchez and the Ceuta crisis: between the enduro and the political disaster

Pedro Sánchez is an enduro fan. He likes to overcome natural obstacles with his bike and exhibit resistance and skill on social networks. Position, braking, curves, gaze, speed control and terrain reading. Manuals for chiefs of staff proliferate, but the president is into enduro. Until now. Classical politics was swallowed up by polarization and its record of service in the field of management today bears an indelible stain on the death rattles of the legislature.

Not even the corruption cases planned against the PSOE and his family have damaged the president's image so much. The five days of “reflection” in April 2024 were a political shock, but the summer meditations of 2026 constitute a hole in Sánchez's story that cannot be erased with supervening empathy or promises based on coming tests.

The crisis in Ceuta is ammunition in the field of immigration, which the right supports to grow at the polls and which leaves the left between principles and the decomplexity of its voters. The sudden entry of more than 70,000 people into Ceuta can only be the result of a hybrid operation anchored in Morocco that has shown the seams of the Government and the State itself. The president could claim immediate ignorance, but not after a month of vacation. Nor can he doubt the undoubted: there was Moroccan collaboration on the ground, as certified by the Police report.

From parliamentary solitude, Sánchez entrusts himself to Saint CNI, whom he questioned a month ago. The trust hole with Morocco is ten hours long. The future of diplomatic relations now depends on the x-ray of that temporary window of July 31 in which the Moroccan authorities, at the very least, inhibited themselves. Then there are the toppings: the mafias, the hoaxes, the reactionary international, Russia, Israel... but nuclear is Morocco's role. And while the Government seeks answers, it is enough to evaluate the management of the emergency to confirm socialist unrest.

Could the “invasion” be repelled by force? The PP has experience on the same El Tarajal beach in 2014: 56 civil guards, rubber bullets, detonating salvos and smoke canisters. Let them not enter. At any price. The result, a tragedy. Even Jorge Fernández Díaz, then minister, admitted that they should not have shot. Sánchez clings to the milestone of the voluntary return of more than 90% of migrants to Morocco in less than 24 hours, although, a month later, no one can count the number of illegal immigrants who remain in the autonomous city. The rain of millions is not perceived in the streets. Sumar separates himself from the PSOE and asks to send the minors to the peninsula; The barons of the PP refuse to welcome them with one hand while they pat their companion in Ceuta with the other, and even the Generalitat, a loyal ally, sets conditions.

The army guards supermarkets and school gates. Financial aid has a calendar: one more month. The PSOE is suffocating. Juan Jesús Vivas, emerges as a sensible titan in the face of the feeling of abandonment in the autonomous city and the people of Ceuta, as heroes in the face of the pilgrimage of ultra scavengers.

The Government is looking for culprits. The struggle between the Ministers of the Interior and Defense had become chronic. Now, Margarita Robles declares, in practice, in rebellion. He prioritizes the defense of his agents on the ground and demonstrates in Congress his detachment from a political narrative that was born lame. The minister may have lost Sánchez's favor in the face of Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who sacrifices himself by expressing in a letter the lack of control over the Police. Recognizing in writing, perhaps with an eye on a judicial case, that he cannot “exercise his ministerial responsibility” without the information that the Police transfers to the National Court and reiterating it before the president of the Judiciary does nothing more than certify the defeat before public opinion.