Sagunto's Socialist councillors back a PP-Vox motion on Ceuta that embarrasses Sánchez
Sagunto's council approved a motion by PP and Vox on Monday, backed by the local Socialist party (PSOE), demanding tougher government action on the Ceuta migration crisis; Compromís and EU-Unidas Podemos voted against it.
An unusual political twist marked Sagunto council's ordinary September plenary session, held this Monday: Socialist councillors, who share power in the town hall's ruling coalition, ended up backing a motion born in the right-wing opposition — PP and Vox — calling for a tough response from the national government, also Socialist-led, on the Ceuta crisis.
PP councillor Ximo Catalán brought the motion to the chamber, strengthened by a last-minute amendment from the local Socialists themselves. The final count went in the motion's favour: PSOE (Spain's Socialist party), PP (the conservative Popular Party), the local party Iniciativa Porteña (which represents the Puerto de Sagunto district) and Vox (the national hard-right party) all backed it, while Compromís per Sagunt (a Valencian nationalist, left-leaning coalition) and EU-Unidas Podemos (an alliance of United Left and Podemos) broke ranks and voted against. The result exposes a clear gap between the line taken by Sagunto's Socialists and the official position of the Socialist-led government in Madrid on managing Spain's southern border.
The motion opens with a message of support for the people of Ceuta and explicit praise for the police officers, Civil Guard members, soldiers, and health, social and emergency workers on the ground there. It's worth noting that Ceuta — a Spanish city on the North African coast with 83,595 residents according to 2025 official records — is the only Spanish city whose land border touches Morocco, a stretch that also serves as the European Union's external frontier; the sponsoring parties use that fact to justify why a town as far away as Sagunto is weighing in on the issue.
Among the measures approved is a call to send back, strictly within the law, those who took part in a mass border crossing on 30 July and remain in the autonomous city of Ceuta without legal status. The text also asks for more police and military personnel to be deployed there, along with new measures to secure the border.
Cases like this are nothing new for the city: back in May 2021, a mass crossing saw around 8,000 people — 1,500 of them minors — enter Ceuta without authorisation, and in the days that followed Morocco took back roughly 4,000 of them. Sagunto's motion doesn't cite that precedent directly, but the logic it follows — demanding lasting solutions to a recurring problem — fits the same pattern.
Beyond security, the motion calls for keeping public services running in Ceuta, providing resources to the relevant authorities, and cushioning the economic blow the crisis deals to local businesses, self-employed workers and staff. It doesn't overlook the humanitarian side either: it demands protection for the safety, wellbeing and rights of those staying in the city without legal status — something the sponsoring parties describe as inseparable from any institutional response.
At the national and EU level, the text calls for a migration policy built on cooperation with migrants' countries of departure and transit, a crackdown on trafficking networks, tighter border controls, and compliance with Spanish, EU and international law. It also asks Madrid and Ceuta's local government to work together seamlessly, taking the city's territorial, demographic and economic circumstances into account, and calls on Brussels for a bigger commitment, including extraordinary funds to offset the crisis.
For Sagunto residents, the vote's significance is mostly symbolic: it shows how national migration politics can seep into the plenaries of town halls far from the headlines, even splitting a local governing team from its own party's line in Madrid. Approved by a majority, the motion carries no binding effect on the municipality itself, but stands as a political pressure gesture backed by most of the local political spectrum.
According to El Periódico de Aquí — Sagunto / Camp de Morvedre and elperiodic.com, with additional background from Wikipedia on Ceuta and the 2021 border crisis.