At the opening of the PSPV Political Conference in Alicante, Rebeca Torró used the Ceuta crisis to attack Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Juan Jesús Vivas. The PSOE secretary of Organisation accused the PP leader of extending his political influence to the party’s regional leaders.
Torró reserved her strongest criticism for Vivas. She said the president of Ceuta had shifted from cooperating with the central government to blocking its response to what the government calls a migration crisis. She tied that shift to his refusal to allow minors to be transferred to the peninsula, saying the move would help restore normality.
Spain’s Ministry of Youth and Childhood says it proposed an emergency transfer of 500 girls from Ceuta to specialised facilities on the peninsula, with legal guardianship remaining with the autonomous city.
Her message to the PP was direct: if the party would not cooperate, she said, it should at least avoid making the situation harder.
Torró said Feijóo and Vivas were competing with Vox instead of defending Ceuta’s residents. She said the government was trying to find an answer to each problem, while the opposition turned every proposal into another political dispute. She also accused the PP of responding with repeated calls for elections and treating the Ceuta crisis as a partisan fight.
The confrontation follows a wider PP mobilisation over Ceuta, including an earlier report on party leaders joining protests. Torró’s speech put Vivas’s conduct at the centre of the PSOE’s criticism, rather than framing the crisis solely as a disagreement between Madrid and the autonomous city.
Official Spanish government figures cited on 13 September 2026 said that 5,321 people had voluntarily returned from Ceuta to Morocco since 10 August, while almost 1,000 more were still arranging their return. On 18 September, the government estimated that around 9,000 to 10,000 people remained in Ceuta after the July influx. Public figures differ depending on whether they cover all arrivals or only minors.
Torró broadened her attack to the electoral system and the courts. She accused the PP of casting doubt on the electoral process and dragging the Tribunal Supremo into what she called a campaign against the voting rights of thousands of people. She said the party had first targeted exiles from the Franco era and was now turning its attention to their children and grandchildren.
Like Justice Minister Félix Bolaños in the Senate earlier this week, Torró called on the high court to act quickly on the law of grandchildren, which is currently suspended as a precautionary measure. She also claimed that the judicial decision bore the signature of a magistrate who had once told Feijóo he wanted to see him become president.
The PSOE is presenting Ceuta as a test of whether the PP will cooperate with the government or compete with Vox. By drawing Juan Jesús Vivas into that national dispute, the party is echoing the position put forward by the Ministry of Youth and Childhood: legal responsibility for the minors remains with Ceuta, and transfers to the mainland are the only workable way to ease pressure on local reception facilities.
On 13 September 2026, the ministry said around 2,100 migrant minors were registered in Ceuta’s reception system. Madrid had already offered funding. It had also offered accommodation and legal support, but the process was waiting for formal approval from the autonomous city.
The PP has publicly opposed transferring minors to the peninsula, a position reported as broadly in line with Vox’s stance. Feijóo has also taken the Ceuta dispute to the European level. He met the EU commissioner responsible for migration and argued that the priority should be to speed up departures instead of finding additional accommodation for arrivals in Ceuta. The party later welcomed European Parliament language that it interpreted as support for Spanish sovereignty and a tougher message to Morocco.
By linking the dispute to the Tribunal Supremo and voting rights, the PSOE has chosen escalation over institutional de-escalation. The government’s handling of Ceuta has become one of the basic lines of attack between the PSOE and the PP, not merely an administrative issue.
