El PP ve movilización masiva por Ceuta pero teme que Vox capitalice la indignación

A month after the massive arrival of migrants to Ceuta in late July, the Spanish Popular Party finds itself trapped between two contradictory impulses. Party leaders across the country's regional governments have detected something they haven't seen in years: genuine, widespread public anger. One regional president compared the street protests from the previous week to the Ermua movement of the 1990s, that civic uprising that followed ETA's kidnapping and murder of town councilman Miguel Ángel Blanco. Another described the crowds as reminiscent of demonstrations he hadn't witnessed since those same protests decades earlier. The PP sees in this mobilization a weapon against Pedro Sánchez's government, a way to hammer the administration over what they view as catastrophic mismanagement of a crisis that has left the autonomous city in chaos more than a month after between 70,000 and 80,000 migrants entered, with roughly 10,000 still remaining.

Yet even as party strategists plot how to extract electoral advantage from public fury, several regional barons are sounding a quiet alarm: the real beneficiary of all this anger may not be the PP at all. "This is who benefits—Vox," one regional president warned privately. The concern is straightforward and troubling for party leadership. When public sentiment becomes inflamed, when the conversation centers on territorial integrity and immigration control, the far right typically gains ground. The PP risks amplifying a wave of indignation that will ultimately wash voters toward its competitor on the right rather than consolidate them within the center-right.

The polling data arriving in the days after the Ceuta crisis began to validate these fears. A 40dB survey published for El País and Cadena SER showed the PP holding steady as the leading party at 32.4% of estimated vote share—a gain of four-tenths of a point from July, but still falling short of their 2023 general election result by seven-tenths of a point. Vox, meanwhile, posted the largest gains of any major party, climbing from 17.2% to 17.8%, and crucially, now polling better than their actual 2023 election performance by 5.4 points. More damaging still: when asked which party was most capable of managing immigration, 27% of respondents named Vox, compared to 18.4% for the Socialist Party and just 13.9% for the PP. A competing pollster, GAD3, painted an even grimmer picture for the conservatives. Their survey showed the PP at 31.1%—two full points below their 2023 result—and projected to lose four seats, dropping from 137 to 133. Vox, by contrast, was forecast to nearly double their July 2023 seat count, climbing from 33 to 69 deputies, with 19.2% of the vote.

Party leadership has responded by steadily escalating its rhetoric against the government. On Monday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused the executive of having "abandoned" the city and "lost its dignity." But Vox has consistently outbid them. The far-right party announced it would file criminal charges against President Sánchez, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, and State Secretary for Security Aina Calvo, accusing them of malfeasance, negligent homicide, and collaboration with terrorism in their handling of the migration crisis. The PP's Madrid headquarters found itself forced to distance the party from more incendiary proposals, such as the one floated by former PP minister Federico Trillo, who suggested declaring a state of exception to enable mass expulsions from Ceuta. Party spokesman Borja Sémper rejected the idea, noting that returning migrants requires no new legal framework—existing Spanish and European law already provides the necessary tools.

Despite the risk of playing on terrain that favors their rightward rival, the PP shows no sign of backing away. Party strategists and some regional leaders believe that angry voters currently drawn to Vox will ultimately return to the PP when emotions cool and elections approach. One regional baron aligned with party leadership expressed confidence that the PP had "acted well, occupying the space and delivering the forceful response people demand," and predicted that once passions settled, those voters would come home. The party's plans remain unchanged. On Tuesday, Ceuta's president was scheduled to travel to Brussels for an intensive round of meetings with European Commission officials and leaders of the European People's Party, where he would present the autonomous city's situation as a matter of "extremely high risk" requiring urgent attention.