Morocco turns up political heat on Spain with call to "liberate occupied cities"

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MADRID — If Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had hoped tensions with Morocco would blow over after this summer’s influx of more than 70,000 migrants into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in North Africa, those hopes were dashed on Monday evening.

At a carefully choreographed religious ceremony at the royal palace in Rabat, with King Mohammed VI in attendance, Morocco’s Minister of Islamic Affairs Ahmed Toufiq described a 15th-century imam as a symbol for Moroccans “to liberate the occupied cities.”

For Sánchez’s beleaguered Socialist government, Toufiq’s menacing reference to Spain’s autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast — home to some 170,000 mainly Spanish citizens — forms part of a worrying pattern of increasingly assertive claims from Rabat.

Only last week, Spain’s foreign ministry had to push back against a call from Morocco’s Justice Minister, Abdellatif Ouahbi, for Madrid and Rabat to discuss the future of the two cities, citing Morocco’s historic and geographical “right” to them.

Facing a general election in the coming months and already floundering under a welter of corruption scandals in his party, Sánchez is desperate to avoid a showdown with Morocco — a country with which Madrid needs to maintain smooth relations because of its vital importance as a partner on trade, migration and fighting drug trafficking.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Ceuta, Sánchez has sought to avoid blaming King Mohammed’s operatives, instead pointing the finger at smuggling networks and misleading social media campaigns for the migrant influx. His Migration Minister Elma Saiz has even hailed Morocco as “a reliable partner, a loyal partner.”

Blaming Morocco

But that diplomatic tone with Rabat is playing badly with the rest of Spain’s parties. Many politicians complain that Rabat withdrew border guards before the surge across the border.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party (PP), who is the current favorite to succeed Sánchez as prime minister, said: “It turns out that [Sánchez] behaves more like a subject of Morocco than a prime minister of Spain.”

He then insisted Spain could not be subject to “blackmail and threats” from its neighbor across the Mediterranean.

The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, has gone further, describing the events in Ceuta as “an act of war promoted by Morocco.”

And it is not just parties on the right blaming Morocco. The far-left Podemos used similar language to Vox, accusing Rabat of waging “a hostile act of hybrid war.”

Sumar, the junior partner in Sánchez’s left-wing government, lodged a request in parliament that Morocco’s status as co-host of the 2030 World Cup, alongside Spain and Portugal, should be withdrawn because of its alleged role in the Ceuta crisis.

The Trump factor

The fear among numerous observers in Spain is that King Mohammed is a close strategic ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, who could be out to show he can be useful to Washington and to Israel by stirring up trouble for Sánchez.

The Spanish prime minister has certainly made himself a potential target for MAGA and the Israeli administration. He has opposed Trump over the war in Iran, denying U.S. forces the use of Spanish bases, and has condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide.”

King Mohammed, by contrast, is making every effort to stay in Trump’s good books, and has good relations with Israel. The Moroccan king joined the U.S. president’s Gaza-related Board of Peace and even named a major highway after Trump over the summer.

Antonio Maíllo, leader of the United Left (IU) party, a junior partner in Sánchez’s coalition, said the “United States-Israel-Morocco alliance … has one objective: to destabilize the [Spanish] government.”

Morocco itself denies any such motivations and — like S´ánchez — blames the migrant surge on online disinformation.

Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa project director at the International Crisis Group, believed it was reasonable to interpret the events in Ceuta as a message from Morocco “to Israel and the U.S. to show them: ‘Look, we’ve done what you implicitly told us to do, we’ve humiliated Spain.”

“The manipulation of migration is something that Morocco is known to have used in the past,” Fabiani also noted.

For Spaniards, the idea that Morocco could engineer a situation to annex Ceuta and Melilla is far from theoretical speculation. Many still remember Morocco’s 1975 “Green March,” an operation mobilizing tens of thousands of civilians to force Madrid to hand over the territory of Spanish Sahara.

Prickly relationship

Jorge Dezcallar, a former Spanish ambassador to Morocco and former head of the Spanish intelligence service, warned that Sánchez’s willingness to accommodate Morocco was backfiring. “Rabat confuses concessions with weakness and even more so when the concessions are constant,” he said.

Spain’s economy is 10 times bigger than Morocco’s, and the European country was once a colonial overlord there. But, as Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University, points out, Spain relies on its neighbor for cooperation in a number of areas beyond migration, including anti-narcotics and anti-terrorism operations.

“Spain and Morocco have been at war with each other on and off for centuries and yet they have these profoundly deep, commercial, security and other kinds of relationships,” he said.

“You’d think: Spain’s the bigger economy and so on, it’s going to be the one in charge, and yet Morocco has found ways to have the upper hand to some degree,” he added, underlining the “prickliness” that Madrid often encounters when dealing with Rabat.

For Spain, the idea that Morocco could engineer a situation to annex Ceuta and Melilla is far from theoretical speculation. | Adri Salido/Getty Images

Morocco’s alleged manipulation of migratory flows into Ceuta and Melilla is one such example, as well as periodically preventing Spanish fishing fleets from accessing its waters.

The perception that Sánchez has been soft on Morocco was fueled by his government’s decision, in 2022, to end nearly five decades of Spanish neutrality on Western Sahara by backing Rabat’s proposal that the territory should come under its control.

That was seen as an effort by Madrid to secure once and for all its neighbor’s cooperation on migration and prevent repeats of May 2021, when Morocco allowed around 10,000 people to cross into Ceuta in the space of a few hours.

The concern for Madrid now is that its pivot on Western Sahara four years ago may not have had the desired effect. Having made progress on its claims to the territory, Morocco instead appears to have been emboldened to broach the question of Ceuta and Melilla.

“From Morocco’s perspective Ceuta and Melilla have always been an open issue, they have always referred to those two territories as occupied,” said Fabiani, who said that recent remarks from U.S. and and Israeli officials broaching the issue made it “low-hanging fruit” for the Moroccans.

He argued that, having made such a bold move to placate Morocco on Western Sahara, Sánchez does not feel he can afford to row back to a more hardline stance.

In the meantime, Morocco’s leadership appears to be closely following the criticism the Spanish government is facing over its handling of this thorny bilateral relationship.

It also seems determined to ensure that, with a general election due within a year, Spain’s next prime minister, widely expected to be Feijóo, follows this government’s line of engagement.

Le360, a publication seen as close to the royal household, stated: “Cooperation with Morocco is not a specific concession on the part of Pedro Sánchez, but rather a structural necessity for any Spanish government, including one led by Feijóo.”

But with Feij´óo slamming Sánchez’s deference to Morocco — and potentially governing with hardliners in Vox — it may be a miscalculation from Rabat that the next government will take so diplomatic an approach.