Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, may not have been a household name last week, but he certainly is after almost 50,000 migrants crossed the Morocco-Ceuta border on Thursday. Shocking scenes of masses of young men flooding the city have been all over the internet, emphasising the flimsiness of Europe’s borders; many people’s fears of the continent being overwhelmed by huge numbers of fighting-age men finally realised.
On X Sánchez said that the “Government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation in Ceuta”. But Adam Wren, Director of The Centre for Justice Policy, summed up the situation well when he reposted Sánchez with the comment “Oh no, I provided incentives and people have responded to them”. Sánchez, after all, was the one to grant the largest migrant amnesty in European history. With the policy starting in April this year, “by mid-June 360,000 people out of 900,000 applications had been granted provisional residency permits as their claims were processed.”
Sánchez is about as left-wing as it gets; the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the ninth president of Socialist International, who has come out with nonsense such as “Spain is the daughter of migration, it won’t be the mother of discrimination”…
… and rather more sinister warnings about “the international ultraright” (projection alert: he was at a conference of the international ultraleft!):
Sánchez issued these dramatic statements at the “Global Progressive Mobilisation” (GPM) conference in Barcelona in April this year, whose aim was to unite “the World’s Progressive Forces” and offer “a necessary alternative to conservative and far-right forces.”
Leaving aside its somewhat alarming nature, the event was informative as it highlighted global alliances most voters have no idea about.
In attendance were:
Alex Soros, the son of George Soros
David Lammy, the UK’s then-Deputy Prime Minister, who seemed extremely pleased to see Sánchez (on Instagram he posted a photo of their meeting accompanied with Justin Bieber music)
