The aftereffects of the Ceuta migration crisis have rumbled on since the summer and opened a range of thorny questions for the EU’s policy agenda. Curiously, however, one of the crisis’s most significant political components has been almost entirely ignored.

The July–August 2026 entry of over 60,000 people into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta included the largest single-day influx of migrants into European territory since the 2015–2016 crisis. Over a hundred people died in crossing.

Media and policy debates have centered on the resulting tensions among EU countries over migration policy. Nearly all member states came down hard against Spain for what they saw as its mismanagement of the issue. Conversely, the government in Madrid railed against the lack of solidarity from other union members and the far-right’s cynical instrumentalization of the tragedy.

Beyond this factious divergence, there is a wider foreign policy question on which parties of both left and right stand guilty. And this is the underlying cause of the crisis.

In the last decade, the EU has attempted to outsource its migration control by cozying up to autocratic governments on the African continent. The Moroccan government has been a beneficiary of this policy and received billions of euros from the EU institutions and European donors, ostensibly for security and cooperation on border control.

The events in Ceuta show it is naive to think this approach can buy security for Europe. The ever-more repressive Moroccan state has used union resources mainly for its own benefit and self-preservation. And rather than encourage the bloc to rethink this misguided strategy, this summer’s events seem to have pushed it further in the same, self-defeating direction.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reacted to the crisis by suggesting the EU would channel even more funds to Rabat. The EU is also seeking to move forward the conclusion of an upgraded strategic and comprehensive partnership with Morocco, which has been in the pipeline for some time, offering additional border-management funding as part of this. The crisis has more broadly accelerated EU plans for return hubs, with talks now beginning with Rwanda—one of world’s most repressive regimes.

Morocco has long played a double game of creating broader crises and then presenting itself to the EU as a necessary partner in solving those same crises. But even if its border cooperation were reliable and effective, European security cannot be reduced to simply counting numbers across its external borders. Strategic stability requires many elements that are in some form connected to third countries’ internal politics.

While the EU undoubtedly needs to engage in border control cooperation with such third countries, it needs to be more attentive to the dangers of a purely transactional approach to foreign policy. Mainstream analysis now constantly pushes Brussels toward tougher, expedient realpolitik. The tragic scenes this summer in Ceuta show where that approach can lead. As policymakers now begin to map out new cooperation with Morocco, this is the lesson they should draw.

The EU needs to bring its migration and democracy policies in line with each other. Increased cooperation with autocratic regimes on border control should always be matched with increased support for democratic actors in civil society and concerted diplomatic pressure for at least some areas of political liberalization.

European governments’ reluctance to do this betrays a fundamental tenet of what the EU is supposed to stand for. In the last several years, the union has promoted democratic security as a concept that supposedly sits at the heart of its external relations. This is rooted in empirical evidence that authoritarian regimes tend to be less constrained in pursuing conflictual external policies and less likely to respect the terms of international accords than are democratic governments.

Despite the rhetoric, in practice, Europe has given little practical priority to democratic security. And crucially, this is true of the whole EU policy establishment, right and left.

The Spanish government is entirely justified in its anger at the lack of solidarity and the far right’s disingenuous exaggeration of the crisis for its own ends. However, progressive and liberal governments in Spain, France, and other member states have themselves doubled down on deeply illiberal foreign policies toward Morocco—and indeed other countries—in recent years.

For many years, both center-right and center-left governments in Madrid have watered down or even blocked the efforts of EU institutions to focus more on human rights and democracy in Morocco. The current government got the EU to pay €500 million ($582 million) for border controls and fences in Ceuta and neighboring Melilla, just as Rabat lurched toward more repressive authoritarianism and despite concerns from the human rights community.

European, and especially Spanish, debate has been about how far the Moroccan government might have encouraged the border crossings. In the European Parliament, Ceuta’s conservative mayor repeated the pattern of the last decade by calling for the union to tie its support to Morocco more strongly to migration and border control cooperation. Almost nothing is said in these debates about the structural nature of the country’s political system itself. Whatever Moroccan authorities’ exact role at the border in July and since then, the EU needs to focus more on the underlying problem of the country’s increasingly repressive political system.

Even if autocracy is not the immediate or direct cause of migration surges, it is a background factor. Last year, young Moroccans erupted in protests across the country. The authorities put these down with brutal force. Without the political process to articulate their grievances, young Moroccans clearly have increasing incentive to look for an exit. European reactions to the repression of protestors were tepid and ambivalent. Indeed, the EU moved to deepen cooperation with the very authorities carrying out the violent repression and human rights abuses.

Beyond internally politicized debates on migration, it is Europe’s wider foreign policy approach that warrants a rethink. If events like those in Ceuta are framed only through the lens of internal European left–right divisions over border controls, this crucial part of their underlying cause will continue to be ignored.