Argentine President Javier Milei has accused the Spanish Government of deliberately encouraging the invasion of Ceuta, telling an audience in Madrid that socialists count every migrant as a vote. He opened his remarks by describing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as an unpresentable dictator.
Milei was speaking on October 21 at a breakfast forum organised by Nueva Economía Fórum. The trip is his seventh to Spain since taking office and he had no meetings scheduled with Sánchez or with any member of the Government.
He said socialists would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven and were willing to turn any heaven into hell in order to do so. What happened in Ceuta at the end of July was neither an accident nor a coincidence, he argued, and the ruin of the country was a price they were ready to pay.
The Argentine President also claimed the economic case for unrestricted immigration had collapsed. Economies that took in the most migrants remained as stagnant as before, he said, because migrants generated more in public spending than they produced and forced higher taxes on productive workers.
Questioned afterwards by journalists, he called Sánchez a delinquent and a thief as well as a liberticide. Spain was the cradle of liberalism, he told the audience, and owed itself a debt of honour to kick the socialists out of power.
More than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta on July 30 and 31, an invasion that the United States State Department later blamed on Sánchez and that left 141 dead by the Government’s own count. The crossings triggered an emergency meeting of European Union interior ministers and a Spanish request for support from Frontex, the bloc’s border agency.
Sánchez told parliament on September 3 that there was no solid evidence Morocco had organised the arrivals, a line he held to as Moroccan ministers renewed their claim to Ceuta and Melilla. His Government approved an emergency package of €309 million for the city.
Milei’s intervention lands in the middle of a Spanish election campaign. Sánchez announced on October 5 that he would dissolve parliament and call an early general election for November 29, after two housing decrees were defeated in Congress.
Later the same day the Argentine President was due to open the tenth Madrid Conference on Austrian Economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University, alongside the economist Jesús Huerta de Soto. The governing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) marked his visit with a banner at its Madrid headquarters.
