(AFP) – US President Donald Trump led far-right attempts Friday on both sides of the Atlantic to make political capital from Spain’s migration crisis, portraying the migrant surge in Ceuta as a warning for America if his opponents get into power.
“I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place,” Trump told a meeting of his cabinet at the presidential Camp David retreat in Maryland. “It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people, and that same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger.”
With polls showing Trump’s support has fallen into the low 30 percent range and opposition Democrats hoping to win at least partial control of Congress in the November midterm elections, the crisis in Spain offers Republicans a chance to return to one of their political strongpoints. News footage of migrants overwhelming barriers to get into Ceuta — a tiny Spanish territory on the Moroccan coast — aired repeatedly on Fox News and went viral across right-wing Trump-allied social media accounts.
There were similar reactions from a range of right-wing and Trump-linked leaders in Europe. Far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alice Weidel claimed in an X post that “Ceuta was left in ruins overnight” by the mass influx from Morocco. She argued that Germany is “likely the destination for most of these migrants.” “Germany must prepare itself: borders must be secured and rejections rigorously enforced,” wrote Weidel, whose party is backed by top Trump officials.
Both Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni and the populist right-wing ruling coalition in Finland called for excluding Spain from the European visa-free zone as a result of the situation. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, a billionaire Trump supporter, said the Ceuta situation was caused by Spain’s policy of offering hundreds of thousands of migrants already in the country a legal status. “They are replacing Spaniards with migrants,” Babis said.
– ‘Invasion of the West’ – Trump’s election victory over Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 was fueled by voter worries over uncontrolled migration on the US-Mexico border and his lurid warnings of migrants coming to murder Americans and even to eat their pets. The Trump administration leapt on the Ceuta crisis in a coordinated messaging barrage. The State Department issued a statement blaming Spain’s government for “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe.”
Without giving detail, the statement said Washington was “considering actions to defend Americans at home and abroad from this threat and stand ready to assist other European allies considering similar options.” Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, posted news footage of the Ceuta migrant wave and said it highlighted “radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.”
“These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration,” Vance posted on X. Late Thursday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a chief architect of Trump’s anti-migration crackdown, posted video of the Ceuta crisis and said “Democrats will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders and they will rejoice.”
– Sebastian Smith with AFP bureaus in Europe
© 2024 AFP
