Alberto Núñez Feijoo has made the Ceuta border crisis a direct challenge to the Spanish government. Speaking in Melilla after a meeting of the PP’s regional leadership, he backed a European Parliament resolution adopted after migrants entered en masse through the Ceuta border. He also announced a security plan for Ceuta and Melilla.
The resolution called for stronger protection of the EU’s external borders and expressed support for the people of Ceuta and Melilla. It addressed sovereignty and border control, while also covering returns and migration cooperation. The European Parliament’s official description was more cautious than some media reports, which used terms such as “invasion” and “hybrid warfare”.
The European Parliament adopted the Ceuta resolution on 17 September 2026 by 339 votes to 225, with 16 abstentions.
Feijoo’s central argument was that Ceuta was not facing a conventional immigration problem.
He said the episode amounted to an assault on the structure of the Spanish state and called it the greatest embarrassment Spain had experienced in living memory. His language put sovereignty and territorial control ahead of the narrower debate over migration management.
The PP leader spoke in Melilla alongside Juan José Imbroda, president of the autonomous city. He referred to the situation in Ceuta fifty days after the mass illegal entry and said disorder there remained complete. That tied the security plan to an unresolved political confrontation, not a routine administrative measure.
Information from the European Parliament’s official press release, the resolution calls for stronger police and security forces in Ceuta because public order and safety remained at risk after the events at the end of July. It also calls for faster returns of people who have no right to remain in the EU and tighter control of the external border.
Feijoo also attacked the government’s conduct throughout the crisis. He said the opposition had secured in Europe what the government itself had voted against, using the parliamentary resolution to support his broader charge that Spain was still a country without a government. The PP’s account presented the vote as a condemnation of the crisis and a demand to clarify responsibility. The resolution itself did not directly condemn Morocco.
His criticism also focused on images of unrest and the pressure on security forces during the episode. In his framing, the border was both the scene of a migration emergency and the place where institutional authority had been tested. The events of 30 and 31 July 2026 remain the central reference point for the parliamentary resolution and the political reaction that followed.
The resolution also called for possible involvement by state and non-state actors in those events to be examined. The distinction matters: reports on the vote linked the episode to the possible instrumentalisation of migration as pressure on the EU border, but the official parliamentary description did not directly find Morocco responsible.
The PP’s presentation fits a wider pattern of political confrontation over Spain’s territorial and social cohesion.
