The Government of Pedro Sánchez has weathered five major crises in its eight years of frenzy that should be put in order: the covid pandemic in 2020 with more than 80,000 deaths; the dana in 2024 with 237 victims; an electrical blackout in 2025; the train accident in Adamuz, which resulted in 46 deaths, and the most recent, the State crisis in Ceuta on July 30 and 31, which resulted in the drowning of 145 people, according to the NGO Caminando Fronteras. Faced with this series of shocks, it is inevitable that the question arises as to whether any could have been avoided and the answer points to the same institutional pattern in all of them: ignoring the warnings, delaying the reaction and, subsequently, overacting by activating a defensive narrative focused on pointing out an external or political enemy.
The crisis in Ceuta constitutes the latest and greatest political scandal within the electoral year, revealing a serious failure in national security and in the political reaction. On July 27, although it took three days to reach the Government, Military Intelligence already warned that the "massive entry" on the 30th was "very likely" after detecting internal orders in the Moroccan border police. Several agencies had already warned of the growing pressure by sea after the Supreme Court's ruling on hot returns.
On July 29, the CNI notified by WhatsApp and through a report to the Government Delegation in Ceuta and the Police and Civil Guard Intelligence units that two groups organized on social networks with 180,000 followers were coordinating a massive assault taking advantage of the Moroccan holiday of Throne Day. The response of the Delegation Cabinet to such a notice was a "sus rilas", which was followed by seven hours of institutional silence. The morning of the assault, the National Center for Immigration and Borders (Cenif) sent a note ratifying the situation of "extreme risk" of collapse with an "immediate nature." Despite this cascade of reports, the border deployment bordered on negligence: only nine civil guards contained the breakwater when the avalanche was unleashed.
This same scheme of neglected warnings and subsequent overreaction debuted in the first major test of the legislature: the covid pandemic, the crisis that has cost the greatest number of lives and in which Spain registered one of the most severe mortality rates in the world. For three months, strong evidence accumulated that went unheeded. Given the constant alerts from the World Health Organization about the existence of a "window of opportunity" and the recommendation of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control to avoid mass events, the response of the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, was to assure: "There is no reason to take additional measures." As with the migratory pressure in Ceuta, where the initial discourse minimized the risk, the virus was treated as a minor threat until, after the celebration of 8-M, it went drastically from disdain to a state of alarm and the confinement of the entire population.
The management of the dana that devastated Valencia in 2024 perfected this machinery for deriving responsibilities; in this case, towards the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón. The data exposes inaction at the regional level, but also at the national level. At 6:43 p.m. on the fateful October 29, the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation, dependent on the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, sent an email alerting of a flow of 1,686 cubic meters per second in the Poyo Rambla, which had begun to overflow at 5:00 p.m. Furthermore, during the critical meeting of the Coordination Center (Cecopi), which was attended by the president of the Confederation himself, Miguel Polo, this vital information was silenced. Polo confessed before the judge that he did not report the overflow at the Cecopi because "it did not catch his attention" and because "he assumed that Emergencies were doing what they had to do."
While the Confederation practiced what the Generalitat described as an "information blackout" - a thesis that the judge investigating the tragedy does not support - between 4:15 p.m. and 6:43 p.m., excusing that these data "were not relevant", within the Cecopi itself the confusion and ineffectiveness were total. The minutes reveal that at 5:00 p.m. the firefighters were already reporting "people on the roofs" in Utiel. A senior official from the Generalitat even suggested sending a message to cell phones in the area, but the measure was rejected. The inactivity of Councilor Salomé Pradas joined that of the Confederation: the representative of the Ministry did not speak about the Poyo ravine to focus on the Forata dam, while the Generalitat sank into its own incompetence, taking hours to send the ES-Alert. The subsequent state strategy was to take advantage of the evident autonomous paralysis to wash away the inaction of the Confederation, dependent on the Government.
In the energy collapse crisis of 2025, the adversary designated by the official story was the energy companies. However, technical warnings preceded the blackout. Twelve days before, the operating companies had already alerted Red Eléctrica de España about severe voltage peaks, receiving in response that the lack of nuclear generation in the system was not a specific event. After the surges on April 22 - which led to a report delivered to the Ministry on the same morning of April 28 - and after five atypical oscillations were recorded during the morning of the blackout, the network continued to operate at its limit. At 12:30 p.m. there were only 11 coupled thermal groups with regulation capacity left, the lowest number of the year. Once the mass disconnection had been completed, the Government once again staged its overacting by urgently meeting executives from the electricity companies, committees of experts and large companies to show a firmness that they did not exercise in the preventive supervision of the system. A measure that they have not taken in the invasion of Ceuta.
Less than a year later, the dramatic Adamuz accident, which left 46 dead, was preceded by direct warnings from the Spanish Union of Railway Machinists. In the summer of 2025, the organization sent a formal letter to ADIF warning of the serious deterioration of the high-speed network, placing specific emphasis on line 010, the exact section where the derailment subsequently occurred. After the catastrophe, the Executive's defensive strategy was not to assume the abandonment of the infrastructure, but to attack the media, accusing them of spreading hoaxes. When this newspaper reported in the following days that the origin of the accident was in the poor condition of the road, the Minister of Transportation, Óscar Puente, tried to discredit the information; However, investigations ended up confirming that the failure in the infrastructure was, indeed, the cause of the tragedy.
The journey through these eight years concludes in an already known scenario: in the Ceuta crisis, where institutional concealment has reached its most serious level. In the face of attempts by the Ministry of the Interior to deny Rabat's involvement by stating that there was no planning, the reports show the opposite. The Police document an "active guidance" of the Moroccan Gendarmerie directing the masses towards the breakwater, heavy trucks transporting immigrants, and non-uniformed agitators directing the Moroccan forces on the ground in a hybrid war operation or "gray zone."
To avoid responsibility for its inaction despite the alerts from the CNI, the Cifas of the Armed Forces and the Police, Sánchez's Executive has not only tried to cover up Rabat's role, but has unleashed a campaign against its own Intelligence services, accusing the CNI of not foreseeing the magnitude of the influx of immigrants. From blindness to epidemiological alerts in 2020 to the questioning of Intelligence agencies in 2026.
