When the Italian prime minister saw what was happening in Ceuta, Spain’s outpost on the North African coast, she concluded that her Spanish counterpart was an easy target.
Here was Europe’s most conspicuous surviving centre-left government caught in the kind of emergency the new right loves to exploit: tens of thousands of migrants penetrating a European border; images of disorder circulating faster than explanations; and a government already notorious among Europe’s border hawks for regularising undocumented workers.
Meloni could blame Sánchez, impose controls on travellers arriving from Spain, and present herself as the leader prepared to protect Europe from socialist sentimentality. Sánchez would be forced either to apologise or to stand alone.
Instead, he picked a fight.
Giorgia Meloni has enjoyed a peculiar advantage over the last four years, the sort available to politicians who promise to overturn the existing order, only to discover that the existing order has already begun renovating itself in their image.
She did not have to march on Brussels. Brussels came quietly toward her, carrying a folder marked “migration reform” and asking where she would like the detention centres built.
The European Commission embraced border externalisation, accelerated deportations, “safe third countries” and agreements with governments whose enthusiasm for human rights tends to diminish whenever the money clears.
Ursula von der Leyen learned to speak the language of the far right while maintaining the expression of a physician reluctantly prescribing unpleasant medicine.
Meloni, once treated as the disreputable heir to Italy’s postfascist tradition, metamorphosed into the woman who knew where Europe was going.
Now her political future is in jeopardy.
At the practical level, Meloni’s fight with Sánchez was absurd. By the time Italy imposed checks on arrivals from Spain, the overwhelming majority of the roughly 72,000 people who had entered Ceuta had already been returned to Morocco.
Ceuta is outside the Schengen zone, making onward travel to Europe exceedingly difficult for anyone without citizenship or legal residency in a member state. Italian ministers nevertheless spoke darkly of potential jihadists progressing toward Italy, as if a person entering Ceuta could reach Rome merely by boarding an escalator.
Spain called the accusations frivolous and imposed reciprocal checks on travellers from Italy. A supposedly decisive act of border defence became a tedious nuisance for tourists and airport officials.
But the practical absurdity was also the political point. Italy’s controls were never principally designed to intercept migrants from Ceuta. They were intended to transform Sánchez into an exhibit in Meloni’s travelling museum of left-wing failure.
Spain’s regularisation program would be blamed for an emergency produced by the sudden collapse—or deliberate withdrawal—of Moroccan border enforcement.
The distinctions between Ceuta and Schengen, between migrants already living in Spain and those crossing its border, and between regularisation and uncontrolled entry would disappear. All would be condensed into a single proposition: the left opened the border, and now Europe must pay.
An emergency need not prove an argument if it can be made to illustrate one. The border becomes a theatre in which every arrival confirms that the nation is disappearing, every administrative failure reveals a conspiracy, and every attempt to distinguish among categories of migrants demonstrates moral degeneracy.
Meloni has been unusually effective at this form of stagecraft because she combines the emotional repertoire of the far right with the administrative manner of a conventional European stateswoman. The inflammatory premise remains, but a summit communiqué has replaced the yelling.
Meloni did not anticipate that Sánchez would refuse the role she had assigned him.
Spain challenged Italy’s figures, contrasted Rome’s indignation with Italy’s substantially larger number of irregular arrivals, and dismissed the supposed threat of onward movement from Ceuta.
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares described Italy’s action as both an attack on Spanish dignity and a torpedo aimed at European unity. Madrid’s retaliation may not have been edifying, but it broke Meloni’s dramaturgy. Instead of a chastened socialist explaining himself before the tribunal of European common sense, there were now two governments inconveniencing one another’s citizens for transparently political reasons.
Even voices of the Italian right described Meloni’s venture as senseless and called for retreat. Opposition politicians denounced a self-inflicted diplomatic crisis whose costs would be paid by Italians rather than by the imaginary columns advancing from Ceuta.
The boomerang was particularly damaging because the gesture had been designed to demonstrate mastery.
A border check marketed as an act of sovereign resolution had revealed itself as a propaganda device for which the government had neglected to formulate an exit strategy. Meloni wanted to humiliate Sánchez but ended up making Antonio Tajani explain why travellers from Spain represented an intolerable threat while travellers from practically everywhere else did not.
Then Germany presented Rome with the bill.
Friedrich Merz’s government announced that it would resume transferring asylum seekers to Italy whose first point of entry into the European Union was Italian territory. Such transfers had largely ceased after Meloni suspended readmissions in 2022. But Berlin argued that their resumption was required under the new European asylum framework and an agreement reached with Italy in 2025.
The first widely reported case involved Abdirisaq Warsame, a twenty-two-year-old Somali woman who had fled a forced marriage and travelled through Italy to join her mother and brother in Germany. German authorities notified her that police would collect her for transfer to Italy on 19 August. The European migration system, having spent years reducing human beings to units of administrative responsibility, had found another one to move.
The German decision was not simply retaliation for Ceuta. Merz has his own reasons for showing severity, foremost among them the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland and the familiar hope that adopting far-right policies will somehow make far-right voters disappear. But its timing transformed a legal dispute into a devastating commentary on Meloni’s behaviour.
Having demanded the strictest precautions against an almost nonexistent movement of people from Ceuta, Italy could hardly complain when Germany proposed rigorously enforcing European rules against people who had actually entered through Italy.
Rome nevertheless complained. The Ministry of the Interior argued that earlier Dublin cases had been extinguished by bilateral agreement and proposed deducting migrants rescued by German-flagged NGO vessels from any future transfers.
The accounting began to resemble a restaurant bill divided among people who all denied having ordered the food. Meloni demanded literal enforcement when Spain bore the burden, and compensation, exceptions, and bilateral understandings when Italy did. She demanded solidarity as the leader of a frontline state, yet treated it as an intolerable surrender when another frontline state asked for it.
This is the governing logic of Europe’s migration regime. Every government supports a European solution whose essential purpose is to shift responsibility elsewhere.
Northern states return asylum seekers to the Mediterranean countries where they first arrived; Mediterranean states demand redistribution toward the north; the Union pays North African governments to prevent people from arriving at all. When those arrangements fail, internal borders reappear, and each state proves its sovereignty by inconveniencing its neighbours. European solidarity increasingly takes the form of an invoice.
Another hypocrisy was too obvious even for the usual euphemisms to conceal. Meloni condemns Spain for offering legal status to people already living and working there, while planning to issue approximately 1.1 million permits to foreign workers by 2028. In her account, Italy’s program is sober labour-market management, while Spain’s is an amnesty that endangers Europe.
Both countries face ageing populations, labour shortages, and welfare systems that a shrinking working-age population cannot sustain indefinitely.
The difference lies less in their need for migrants than in the language through which they admit that need. Sánchez speaks of immigrants as workers, neighbours, and potential citizens. Meloni wishes to recruit their labour while preserving their political function as evidence of civilisational peril.
This makes Spain an increasingly anomalous country within the European Union. Sánchez leads one of the few remaining substantial centre-left governments and perhaps the only one still prepared to make progressive policy a matter of European dispute.
Spain has resisted the hardening of migration policy, opposed Donald Trump over Gaza and the Iran war, rejected the relentless inflation of NATO spending targets, and challenged Europe’s retreat from climate commitments.
None of this makes the governing PSOE a revolutionary party. Its transformation matters precisely because it was unexpected. Circumstances have radicalised a party of managerial social democracy into recognising that there may no longer be a safe technocratic centre to occupy.
The contrast with Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen is instructive. Frederiksen has built a close alliance with Meloni around migration, showing how easily a nominal centre-left party can accept the right’s categories in the hope of preventing the right from monopolising them.
Once migration is defined primarily as a danger against which national cohesion must be defended, the dispute between social democrats and national conservatives becomes an argument over who can operate the machinery of exclusion more competently. The alliance ratifies the far right’s account of the world as the common ground upon which political differences will be negotiated.
Sánchez has moved in the opposite direction. His dependence on parties to the PSOE’s left and on Catalan and Basque nationalists has pushed his government beyond the habits of post-Cold War social democracy. It has raised the minimum wage, pursued labour reform, defended regularisation, recognised Palestine, and made historical memory a question of democratic legitimacy.
Some of these decisions arose from conviction and some from parliamentary arithmetic, a distinction of less importance than political purists imagine. Governments frequently discover their principles while looking for the votes needed to survive. Sánchez has become conscious that his government is not merely administering Spain but defending one of the few remaining alternatives to the political order forming around it.
That consciousness gives the clash with Meloni a historical resonance neither leader could entirely escape.
Mussolini’s Italy did not merely cheer Franco from the sidelines during the Spanish Civil War. It sent aircraft, ships, weapons, and tens of thousands of soldiers to help destroy the Spanish Republic.
Fascist Italy regarded Spain as both a proving ground for modern warfare and a theatre in which the international left could be broken. The Republic’s defeat became evidence that fascism possessed energy and historical momentum while democracy and socialism could offer only division and retreat.
Ceuta was not another Guadalajara, and it would be grotesque to pretend otherwise. Meloni is not Mussolini, Sánchez does not preside over the Popular Front, and inconvenienced passengers at Barajas are not members of the International Brigades.
But history need not repeat itself literally to shape the political imagination.
Meloni and Sánchez could be the European leaders most self-conscious about the fascist past, though in opposite ways. Meloni has devoted her career to converting the institutional and symbolic inheritance of Italian neofascism into respectable national conservatism. Sánchez has insisted, through Franco’s exhumation and the Democratic Memory Law, that Spanish democracy must rest upon an active reckoning with dictatorship rather than convenient amnesia.
Sánchez treats antifascist memory as a democratic boundary: not a complete political program, but a statement about what must remain beyond the limits of legitimate power. Meloni’s project requires dissolving that boundary. Her success depends upon presenting antifascism as an obsolete obsession deployed against a patriotic right that has put away the black shirts and learned to navigate EU budget negotiations.
This helps explain why defeating Sánchez is so valuable to Meloni. General elections are expected by autumn 2027, and the combined left opposition has become a credible threat after years of fragmentation made her rule appear more secure than its social support warranted.
Elly Schlein’s Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement, and the Green and Left Alliance remain divided, but no longer look incapable of assembling an alternative. Meloni needs to demonstrate not merely that the right governs Italy, but that history has rendered the left incapable of governing anywhere.
Sánchez would set a useful example as the doomed endpoint of progressive politics: the prime minister who regularised migrants, defied Europe, and was finally overwhelmed by reality.
Smashing Sánchez would send a message to Italian voters. If Spain could be presented as a country endangered by socialist permissiveness and rebuked by Europe, Schlein and her allies could be accused of proposing to import the same disaster. The election would become a referendum not on wages, public services, executive overreach, or Meloni’s record, but on whether voters wished to turn Italy into Sánchez’s Spain.
Ceuta would supply the images and the gesture of command that border checks provide. All that remained was for Sánchez to accept his humiliation.
His refusal matters because European social democracy has spent much of the past generation confusing responsibility with capitulation. Faced with a rightward shift in public discourse, centre-left parties adopted the right’s assumptions and congratulated themselves for sanding down the sharpest edges. They embraced austerity to prove fiscal seriousness, detention to prove control, and border externalisation to prove that compassion would never interfere with security.
Each concession was defended as the price of remaining electorally relevant. The result was to make the right’s account of reality appear incontestable while rendering the left itself increasingly unnecessary.
Spain has not escaped this history, nor has Sánchez transcended the coercive realities of the border. His government deployed soldiers and riot police in Ceuta and returned tens of thousands of people to Morocco. Its position is not one of open borders, whatever Meloni’s propaganda requires Italians to believe.
The difference is narrower but fundamental: Spain continues to distinguish between defending a territorial border, regularising people already embedded in society, and transforming the migrant into the nation’s organising enemy. Meloni needs to collapse those categories because permanent emergency underpins her authority.
Spain’s lonely place in Europe is not the moral purity of the dissident. It remains a fortress state at Ceuta and Melilla and a participant in the EU’s lethal border regime.
What sets Sánchez’s Spain apart right now is its refusal to make migration become the master metaphor of political life. It still insists that a country can police a border without defining itself by hatred of those who cross it, and that migrants can be necessary workers and future citizens rather than an inexhaustible reserve of public fear.
Meloni thought the argument had already been settled.
Her influence over European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her alliances with conservatives and accommodating social democrats, and the absorption of far-right policy into the European centre had persuaded her that Sánchez was a relic awaiting correction.
Ceuta seemed to offer the instrument of correction. Instead, Spain refused to submit, Italy found itself isolated in a quarrel of its own making, and Germany demonstrated how quickly the machinery of exclusion could be turned against its most enthusiastic operator.
That is not a victory in any final sense.
Europe continues moving toward Meloni’s world. Spain cannot reverse that movement by checking passports on flights from Rome. But the confrontation revealed something her project had worked hard to conceal: the new European order is neither natural nor unanimous.
Meloni went to war expecting Sánchez to prove that the left was finished. What she found was a government conscious of precisely how much depended upon refusing to surrender in advance.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
