Sanchez Called the European Reaction Selfish, and Rome Threatened to Suspend Schengen

Pedro Sanchez criticised the response of several European Union leaders to the Ceuta crossings, saying that calls for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen area were driven by prejudice, misinformation, ignorance or political interest. Giorgia Meloni had raised the possibility of suspending Italy's open border arrangement with Spain.

The threat is more significant as a precedent than as a policy. Schengen suspension between two member states over a migration event at an external border would establish that free movement is contingent on how well a country is judged to be managing a frontier, which is not the basis on which the area was constructed.

It also inverts an argument Spain has made for years. Madrid's position has consistently been that an external border is a European responsibility rather than a national one, because the consequences of a crossing at Ceuta are felt across the union rather than in Ceuta alone. Being threatened with exclusion for the failure of a shared responsibility is the inversion.

The domestic effect is more predictable than the European one. Sanchez has spent his premiership positioned as a leader who treated migration differently from the European right, and Ceuta has handed his opponents the strongest available argument that the approach does not survive contact with a real event.

Nothing has been suspended, and probably nothing will be. What the week established is that the option can now be raised in public by a sitting head of government, which is a change in what is sayable, and those changes tend to precede changes in what is done.