Spain's Sahrawi citizenship law tests delicate balance with Morocco

Spain's Congress voted to approve a citizenship bill in September 2026 that would create a special pathway to Spanish nationality for Sahrawis born in Western Sahara during the years Spain administered the territory. The measure passed with 168 votes in favor, 31 against, and 145 abstentions. It still requires Senate approval before becoming law, but the vote itself has already unsettled Madrid's relationship with Morocco in ways that extend far beyond the immediate question of who gets a passport.

The bill's mechanics are straightforward. Anyone born in Western Sahara before September 29, 1977—when Spain formally ended its colonial administration—could apply for Spanish citizenship through a streamlined process that bypasses the standard ten-year residency requirement. First-degree descendants of those born in the territory would also be eligible. For Sahrawis already living legally in Spain, the residency clock would reset to just two years instead of the usual decade. Estimates suggest between 70,000 and 110,000 people could eventually qualify, though the range reflects genuine uncertainty about how many will pursue the application. Those numbers matter because each person who gains Spanish nationality automatically becomes a European Union citizen, acquiring all the rights and protections that status confers.

Spain's supporters of the measure frame it as a reckoning with colonial history. When Spain withdrew from Western Sahara in 1976, they argue, it left behind people in legal limbo—born under Spanish rule but suddenly stateless when Madrid departed. The bill, in this telling, corrects an injustice Spain itself created. The government has precedent for this reasoning. In 2015, Spain opened a special citizenship route for Sephardic Jews who could demonstrate their heritage and connection to Spain, reaching back to the expulsion of 1492. That earlier law showed Madrid was willing to use historical ties as a basis for nationality policy. The Sahrawi bill follows the same logic, just applied to a more recent and more contested colonial relationship.

Morocco's concern is not primarily territorial. The law does not change who controls Western Sahara, does not recognize an independent Sahrawi state, and does not alter Spain's official position—adopted in 2022 under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez—that Morocco's autonomy proposal for the territory represents the most serious and credible path to resolution. What troubles Rabat is the relationship the law creates between Spain and a population with direct stakes in Western Sahara's future. The potential beneficiaries include not only Sahrawis living in the territory itself but also members of the refugee population clustered around Tindouf in Algeria, where the Polisario Front—the separatist movement seeking independence—is based and administers camps. If tens of thousands of people from those communities become Spanish and EU citizens, Spain will have created a constituency with personal and family ties to an issue at the heart of its diplomatic relationship with Morocco.

The timing compounds the sensitivity. Spain and Morocco had endured a serious diplomatic crisis before Sanchez's 2022 pivot toward backing the autonomy proposal. That shift helped repair the relationship, and the two countries have since deepened cooperation on migration, security, trade, and other fronts. The citizenship bill does not formally contradict Spain's support for autonomy, but from Morocco's perspective, the two issues cannot be cleanly separated. Both concern Western Sahara. Both involve how Spain relates to the territory's future. And the bill has become entangled in Spain's domestic political debate about its colonial past—a debate that itself signals shifting priorities.

Inside Spain, the measure has divided the political establishment. The governing Socialist Party and its coalition partner Sumar backed it. The conservative People's Party abstained. Vox opposed it. The disagreement reflects deeper questions about how Spain should reckon with its former colonial rule and what legal mechanisms are appropriate for doing so. Morocco has watched this internal Spanish debate closely, understanding that the bill's significance lies not in what it immediately changes on the ground but in what it reveals about how Spain now thinks about its relationship with Western Sahara and its colonial legacy.

The bill also raises a question that cuts both ways. If Spain can invoke historical ties to create special nationality rights for Sahrawis, and has already done so for Sephardic Jews whose connection to Spain predates the modern era by centuries, what does that precedent mean for Morocco's own historical claims? Morocco considers the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla—located on Morocco's northern coast—to be integral parts of its territory. Spain rejects this claim and treats the cities as non-negotiable Spanish territory. But if historical ties and colonial relationships can form the basis for present-day legal rights, as Spain is now arguing, Morocco could ask why its own eight centuries of rule over parts of the Iberian Peninsula, or its geographical proximity to Ceuta and Melilla, should be treated as irrelevant to its sovereignty claims. The logic cuts both ways, and that asymmetry is precisely what makes the bill so delicate for Madrid.

The Senate still must vote. But the Congress approval has already shifted something in the diplomatic atmosphere. The bill does not change the territorial status of Western Sahara, does not alter Spain's official position on autonomy, and does not grant Sahrawis any control over the territory's future. What it does is bring Spain's colonial history into a broader conversation about how nations address their pasts and what obligations they owe to people affected by their former rule. For Morocco, that conversation itself—regardless of the law's practical effects—signals a recalibration in how Spain understands its interests and its history. The real test will come in how Madrid manages the relationship between this new citizenship pathway and its continued diplomatic support for Morocco's autonomy proposal.