I’ll go to my grave believing that, before Thursday last week, few outside the Sporcle-elite could point to the North-African Spanish exclave of Ceuta on a map.

That lack of knowledge was all to the good of the European right. Relying on a little public ignorance, they spun a short-lived and potentially orchestrated civilian incursion into yet another code-red threat to civilisation as we know it. But don’t get distracted by those dangerous games. It’s the deranged response to the event by governments across Europe that shows how powerful the right has become across the continent.

Over the weekend, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf travelled to Ceuta. In the spirit of ‘every crisis is an opportunity’, he wasted no time posting a video sprinkled with claims I can’t verify.

“We saw some of them maraud through town overnight,” he said, speaking of the roughly 60,000 mostly men who swam five kilometres around the Moroccan coast to reach the city on Thursday. “We saw them loot shops, we saw them terrorise locals,” he continued.

There have been no credible reports of looting or marauding. Vehicles were torched, but in Findeq, a border town in Morocco. Some Ceuta locals may have been understandably terrified when the city’s population suddenly increased by 75%, but, again, there’s no evidence anyone was terrorised. There were, however, fatalities. At least 72 Moroccans have been reported killed in their attempt to cross the border, crushed or drowned in the rush.

Of course, by the time Yusuf shot his video, most of the migrants had returned home – with the Spanish government reporting 90% having left by Saturday evening, most voluntarily. And while Yusuf’s profile isn’t big enough to draw much attention, when other figures from the European right arrived in Ceuta to exploit the situation on Sunday, they were met with protests from residents.

Right-wingers are gonna right-wing. No surprises there. But far from showing solidarity with Spain for the breach of its territory, many European governments have turned on its leftwing prime minister Pedro Sánchez.

No-one appears to have crossed the roughly 20kms of sea from Ceuta to Spain. Ceuta is not part of the EU’s Schengen agreement, meaning there is no control-free crossing between it and Spain. Yet Italy has imposed border controls anyway. With new checks on airport and port arrivals of third country nationals from Spain, it’s a PR move: if someone got to Spain illegally, why not just take a bus through France?

Fine. Italy is governed by the rightwing Giorgia Meloni. But centrist governments are seizing the moment too. The leaders of 22 of the EU’s 27 countries have called for urgent talks over the Ceuta border breach (they’ll happen tomorrow). And in a letter to the bloc’s leaders, they highlighted a Spanish domestic policy as a “pull factor”, demanding it be eliminated.

That’s a reference to Sánchez’s amnesty for undocumented migrants without a criminal record who arrived in Spain before this year. Over a million people have applied, ahead of a deadline tomorrow. Spain under Sánchez also opened new pathways to residency last year. The economic benefits have been stark, with the country the top performer for growth by some margin amongst the major eurozone economies last year (it also left the UK in the shade). It’s predicted to repeat that success in 2026.

That’s no doubt an irritation to centrist governments who’ve jigged along to the right’s fear-mongering tunes, now caught in a doomloop of economic stagnation and public fever-dreams around migration. And there’s more egg-on-the-face likely to come, as evidence mounts that Spain might not have been subject to an organic run on the border, but rather an act of political warfare on an EU member.

Who needs enemies when you’ve got allies, eh?

According to reports, viral social media posts from new accounts encouraged young Moroccans to go to Ceuta, fuelled by the promise of an open border. Some posted routes and instructions for where to buy swimming equipment. Those accounts have now disappeared.

Some have suggested Morocco is behind it (it’s done it before). But interference may have stemmed from further afield. US Vice President JD Vance was quick to share a Fox News clip describing migrants storming the border of northern Spain (so French?). Cribbing the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security strategy, Vance blamed “mass migration and the radical leftwing globalist policies that have enabled the invasion of the West” for the images.

And while Sánchez is loathed in Washington for refusing to let US warplanes bound for Iran use Spanish bases or airspace, Morocco is on the up. Its government signed Trump’s Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, and joined Trump’s disjointed Gaza Board of Peace this January.

Could the math be mathing?

Whoever the culprit, here’s the lesson. Leftwing baddies, beware. It’s (hybrid) war out there.

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