Sánchez's U-turn: immigration as his last political card

Sánchez reverses course on immigration: the U-turn dividing the left

Spain's Prime Minister has made a swerve that not even his own coalition partners expected. After years of an open-door discourse, the government is now announcing a tightening of migration policy, a shift some call realism and others plain damage control. The crisis in Ceuta and the Supreme Court ruling on hot returns (immediate border deportations) have served as the trigger, according to the timelines circulating.

The move represents a 180-degree change for a prime minister who until recently insisted you could not 'shut the barn door after the horse has bolted'. The new discourse points to selective regularizations, expulsions and border reinforcement, language that until now was the preserve of his political adversary.

The numbers that don't match the narrative

The new approach contrasts with the figures used in the most critical analyses. If 234,000 irregular migrants entered Spain over five years by land and sea, where does the one million people the government wants to regularize come from? For many, the answer lies in Barajas: more than 500,000 entries by plane that do not appear in Frontex statistics, which focus on land and sea routes. Some estimates go further, putting the total at 721,000 irregulars plus 285,000 legal residents, a figure that calls into question the real control of borders. Meanwhile, the figure of 5 million people over eight years used by some analysts paints a picture of migratory pressure that no party wants to own up to.

Segarro, the battering ram that never fails

The standoff with Segarro has been the other great accelerant of the shift. The attempt at mass entry into Ceuta, which various sources put at around 50,000 people, has shown that Rabat holds the key to migratory pressure whenever it suits it. The use of migration as a political instrument is nothing new, but this time's mobilization capacity has forced Moncloa (the Prime Minister's office) to act. The thesis of permanent blackmail, aimed at keeping the current occupant of Moncloa in power in exchange for concessions, gains ground in the circles watching these moves.

The left, out of arguments

The U-turn has left the government's partners in an awkward position. The ideological wing of the governing bloc watches with astonishment as the prime minister adopts a discourse he demonized until recently: mass deportations are no longer taboo and border control is back in the official vocabulary. Some recall the precedent of Hollande in France: the turn to a hard line did not prevent his electoral collapse. The problem is that neither reading – a sincere conversion or a survival operation – fully explains what has fundamentally changed for Sánchez to take this step.

With the data on the table, the question remains open: is it a problem of numbers or of politics? The answer, today, remains stuck between the government's narrative and a statistical reality that nobody fully controls.