Morocco Named No Party, But Spain’s PP Rushed to Confess Over Ceuta

On Sep 11, 2026

Marrakech – Twenty-four years ago, José María Aznar, then the Partido Popular (PP) prime minister, sent commandos by helicopter onto a wind-scoured, uninhabited islet barely 200 meters off the Moroccan coast, where local Moroccan families had for years taken goats to graze, and called it a defense of Spain. The 2002 operation to retake Perejil, code-named Romeo-Sierra, landed 28 Spanish special-operations troops on the rock, where they detained the six Moroccan servicemen then stationed there without a shot being fired.

On August 27, the same Aznar – long out of office but still the elder voice of his party’s harder line – returned to occupied Ceuta for the first time in more than two decades, in the thick of a fresh crisis with Rabat. He demanded “firmness,” warned that “weakness” by a state is “always provocative,” and declared that “national sovereignty does not take holidays.”

Perejil was hardly a strategic prize. It held a reflex – the Partido Popular’s instinct to reach for confrontation with Morocco whenever the domestic wind turns cold. That reflex fired again this Friday.

The party that answered a charge nobody named

Morocco’s Foreign Ministry named no party. Its Thursday communiqué spoke of “certain Spanish political and media circles,” and lamented that “historic parties – versed in government” had tumbled into a “quagmire” where “unreasonable populist one-upmanship” prevails over common sense. A wide net, deliberately cast.

Yet within hours the PP had published, on its own letterhead, an official rebuttal expressly presented as a response to Morocco – a party arrogating to itself the reply owed by a state, and addressing a nation whose sovereignty predates modern Spain. It opened with the declaration that “nothing is above the defense of Spain” and proceeded to accuse Morocco outright of being “responsible for what happened by action or omission.”

COMUNICADO OFICIAL.

Nada está por encima de la defensa de España. pic.twitter.com/F0L9UHnmj2

— Alberto Núñez Feijóo (@NunezFeijoo) September 11, 2026

Nobody filed the charge; the party volunteered the confession. Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta – the unrequested excuse is the plainest admission. Or, as the Castilian idiom runs, quien se pica, ajos come: the one who feels the sting is the one who ate the garlic. By rushing to don the coat, the PP proved the fit.

And in doing so it did precisely what Rabat had asked it not to do. Morocco’s text was, at bottom, a plea against instrumentalization – a refusal to be turned into “pre-electoral stock-in-trade” or “the scapegoat of politicians’ score-settling.”

It recalled the architecture the two kingdoms built after the April 7, 2022 joint declaration following the meeting between King Mohammed VI and Pedro Sánchez: Spain as Morocco’s first economic partner, Morocco as Spain’s second-largest trading partner outside the EU, and security cooperation that has dismantled terrorist and criminal networks and saved lives, sometimes, the ministry noted, at considerable human and material cost to Moroccan security forces.

Against that ledger, the ministry posed three direct questions. Why keep the indictment against Morocco alive when, in Rabat’s formulation, no datum, fact, or report establishes any involvement by its authorities? Why are the migrants not returned, when Rabat committed officially to readmit them? Why are unaccompanied minors held from families the kingdom has urgently asked to receive them?

The PP’s answer was to swallow two of those questions and choke on the third. Indeed, its own communiqué declared that it agreed with Morocco that two questions were “very pertinent”: why Spain has not carried out the returns despite Morocco’s commitment to receive those who entered irregularly, and why minors remain away from their families despite Rabat’s request for their return. Those are serviceable cudgels against the Socialist PSOE government of Sánchez.

It quietly abandoned the one that dismantles its own thesis. The first Moroccan question – the inconvenient one about the evidentiary basis for accusing Rabat itself – received no equivalent answer. Selective forgetting is a form of argument, though not an honest one.

From ‘hybrid attack’ to the problem of proof

For the thesis survives only by scaffolding. The party still brands “the invasion suffered in Ceuta on July 30” a “serious violation of the territorial integrity of Spain and, by extension, Europe” and an “attack hybrid with an instrumentalization of irregular immigration.” It then pronounces Morocco “responsible for what happened by action or omission.”

That last formula rewards a second look. “By action or omission” is the language of a prosecutor who has no proof of the action and so reserves the right to convict on the omission – a verdict rendered first, evidence to be located later, if ever.

The official Spanish record is more complicated than either side’s political shorthand. The 40 documents the Spanish government has declassified do not establish that Rabat planned or intellectually authored the July 30-31 operation. But neither do they amount to an exoneration of Moroccan conduct. A military-intelligence assessment judged it “highly likely” that Moroccan authorities were not actively encouraging the migration wave but had acted negligently or passively. A Guardia Civil document entertained several hypotheses, including possible connivance. The CNI recorded an absence of a sufficiently proactive Moroccan response.

Separate from those declassified files, the 55-page CENIF police report submitted to the Audiencia Nacional went further, pointing to “active guidance” by people identified as Moroccan security personnel and arguing that the movement had been planned. But crucially, the report did not identify the intellectual author of the operation or attribute its planning to the Moroccan government itself; senior Spanish police officials subsequently made that distinction explicit.

That leaves evidence on which to debate Moroccan border conduct, but not the proof of state orchestration that the PP’s rhetoric repeatedly implies. Suspicion, negligence, passivity, even alleged facilitation are not interchangeable with proof that Rabat designed and commanded the operation. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between an allegation and an established fact. The intelligence would not carry the accusation, so the PP carried it regardless.

Notice, too, the retreat the party will not name. Before Congress, Alberto Núñez Feijóo declared that “Ceuta did not suffer a migratory crisis; it was an invasion that continues.” He went still further, claiming that “the operation came from Morocco,” was “consented to by Morocco,” and that there were “indications” Rabat had coordinated it.

On paper, however, the PP now fastens the word “invasion” specifically to July 30 – “the invasion suffered in Ceuta on July 30” – while saying that the resulting “crisis” continues “to this day.” The bravado is for the stalls; the text is for the record, and the two formulations no longer carry quite the same weight.

When foreign policy becomes electoral arithmetic

None of this is improvisation so much as arithmetic. For most of August, Feijóo stopped short of directly accusing the Moroccan government of orchestrating the crossing. He demanded “reciprocity,” rejected what he called threats or blackmail from Morocco, questioned failures in bilateral border cooperation, and concentrated much of his fire on Sánchez. The CENIF report at the beginning of September supplied the political opening for a much sharper turn: Feijóo then declared that the operation “came from Morocco,” was “consented to” there, and appeared to have been coordinated there.

He knows what a long Spanish diplomatic tradition already demonstrates about Morocco’s weight in Madrid’s foreign policy. Felipe González, Aznar, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and Mariano Rajoy all chose Morocco for their first official foreign visit as prime minister. Rabat has never been an ordinary neighboring capital in the calculations of La Moncloa.

Behind him, his barons strain at the leash. Isabel Díaz Ayuso has declared that, were she prime minister, she would “break relations with Morocco.” Aznar, meanwhile, used his August visit to demand firmness and warn that state “weakness” invites provocation.

The divergence became sufficiently awkward that Feijóo this week ordered his regional leaders to centralize the party’s messaging. PP sources spoke openly of avoiding “thirty bright ideas,” “overacting,” and improvised declarations, while insisting that the “discursive command” should remain in Génova. Party figures widely saw the intervention as aimed above all at Ayuso.

Feijóo himself took over the PP in April 2022 as the unity candidate brought in after the party’s bruising internal crisis between then-leader Pablo Casado and Madrid president Ayuso, which ultimately forced Casado out and brought down the previous leadership. That is the posture of a leader governed by his flank rather than governing it.

The PP’s communiqué nevertheless tries, near the end, to recover the language of statecraft. It says Spain and Morocco “share a border and a common responsibility for its management,” calls for “a rigorous and urgent assessment,” conduct that is “loyal and transparent by all parties,” and “verifiable guarantees” that similar events will not recur. It even reiterates a desire for a “loyal and stable relationship” with Morocco based on “mutual respect, institutional loyalty, transparency, reciprocity and full respect for the sovereignty of both states.”

But having spent the preceding paragraphs accusing Morocco of responsibility for a “hybrid attack,” the conciliatory vocabulary arrives carrying the weight of everything that came before it.

The text closes with the categorical line, “Ceuta and Melilla are Spain” – the tell of a party that mistakes volume for statecraft and mortgages a permanent interest for a passing cycle.

Geography, the Moroccan ministry observed, is immutable; leaders decide whether it becomes an asset for the future or a source of recurring mistrust and tension. Offered the bridge, the PP reached, once again, for the rock.

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