Užsienio reikalų ministras Kęstutis Budrys trečiadienį dalyvaus neformaliame Europos Sąjungos užsienio reikalų ministrų susitikime (Gymnich) Viklou mieste Airijoje.

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Most migrants have returned to neighbouring Morocco, but as many as 5,000 remain in the Spanish exclave.

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CEUTA, Spain — Spanish police fired shots into the air Monday morning as they worked to clear several thousand young men from an encampment in a parking lot beside Ceuta’s city hospital. The chaotic scene, with officers using batons to direct migrants toward the center of the city, was an uncomfortable reminder of the gap between early assurances from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his government that the crisis was largely over — and the reality unfolding in Ceuta’s streets. At the time, Spanish and EU officials said that nearly all of 72,000 migrants who crossed from Morocco to Ceuta had abandoned the city. But as his police was intervening on Monday morning, Sánchez had to concede in a radio interview that around 5,000 of them remained in the Spanish territory. That number is disputed by officials like Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas, who maintains that some 10,000 unauthorized people are still in the city. The CEP police union and Spanish National Police officers who spoke to Axel Springer’s Global Reporters Network agreed with the larger figure. Among the migrants that remain in the city are some 1,200 unaccompanied minors who are due to be transferred to shelters on the Iberian Peninsula in the coming weeks, Sánchez said Monday. The prime minister has vowed that his government will resolve the crisis with “dignity” and in accordance with the law. In practice, that means migrants must be allowed to file asylum claims and have their cases considered — a process that could substantially delay any deportations. The unresolved situation is turning Ceuta into a theater of ongoing violence between locals, Spanish authorities and the remaining migrants. Several Spanish soldiers were injured after a group of around 40 young migrants pelted them with stones last week. In a separate incident, police arrested three migrants Sunday accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a platoon patrolling the exclave. Meanwhile, Spanish police last week intervened to protect migrants after local demonstrators stormed their improvised encampment on Ceuta’s El Trampolín beach and set fire to their belongings.  It’s on El Trampolín that Laarvi and his son Omar, both from Tetouan in Morocco, set up camp. “My son couldn’t find work back home,” Laarvi said. The men said they dream of a better life on the Spanish mainland, and perhaps someday further north in Europe.  But those dreams are unlikely to come to fruition. Sánchez confirmed Monday that those who entered Ceuta for economic reasons would not qualify for asylum and would be subject to deportation. Escalating violence The removals cannot come soon enough for locals frustrated with the continued presence of thousands of migrants in the city. Shelters and tents along Tramoplín beach in Ceuta on Aug. 31, 2026. | Antonio Sempere “Normally, elderly people spend the summer at the beach, but they can’t do that anymore,” said Jalid Ali Amar, a local resident who owns a restaurant near the encampment on El Trampolín beach. Ali Amar said the city’s inhabitants had been forced to endure weeks of chaos. He added that he had no respect for the migrants “because they have no respect” for locals, many of whom he said are now too afraid to leave their homes because of the deteriorating security situation. Sebastián Sützl, a spokesperson for Spain’s CEP police union in Madrid, said crime in the exclave had increased eightfold since July 30, but provided no evidence to substantiate the claim. Spain’s interior ministry declined to confirm or deny a rise in criminality, saying it had yet to receive the latest crime statistics from Ceuta. During a visit to the exclave last week, however, Attorney General Teresa Peramato confirmed that authorities had detected an increase in criminal assaults and crimes against private property over the past month. And on Monday, Ceuta’s Public Prosecutor’s Office said it was investigating 22 alleged sexual assaults targeting migrant women and girls, as well as an additional case involving a man belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. “Many women have been raped,” said Helena Maleno, spokesperson for migrant rights NGO Caminando Fronteras. She added that the true number could be higher than the figure confirmed by Spanish officials, as migrant women may not know how to report sexual assaults or trust authorities enough to do so. Aid groups are increasingly caught in the middle of the violence. Nolte Bauer, an activist with Mission Lifeline, a German NGO that works with migrants and internally displaced people, said he had received death threats. He added that unidentified people had attempted to slash the wheels of his truck, from which migrants can charge their phones for free. Protesters have also tried to stop Red Cross vehicles from distributing food to migrants. “I understand that the current situation is stressful for local residents, and I understand that they are protesting,” Bauer said. “But threatening people with death, hunting people down and setting camps on fire — that crosses a line.” The activist questioned the lack of solidarity with the migrants. “Europe is over there,” he said. “There is plenty of space.” Frustration builds The unresolved crisis is proving to be a major challenge for Sánchez. A third of the government’s ministers have been summoned to testify in extraordinary parliamentary hearings on the situation in Ceuta, during which lawmakers belonging to political groups that have traditionally supported the prime minister are increasingly expressing their frustration with the situation in the city. Spanish National Police officers interact with a group of people in Ceuta. | Antonio Sempere Lawmaker Mikel Legarda, a member of the regionalist Basque Nationalist Party, slammed the government for “negligence” over the factors precipitating the crisis in Ceuta, and its “inaction” in returning the city to normalcy. “The question is unavoidable: Where is the state?” he asked in parliament. The Sánchez government on Tuesday unveiled a €309 million stimulus package to reinforce Ceuta’s security infrastructure, reinforce public services, aid local businesses and humanitarian support for migrants. “The main objective of the decree is to give confidence to both businesses and workers,” said Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo. “We are aware of the urgent need to act to restore the tranquility and confidence that Ceuta’s citizens and businesses need.” But it remains unclear whether the measures will be enough to heal the lasting rifts the crisis is creating within the exclave. Ceuta has long prided itself on being a bastion of hospitality and peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims on the North African coast, but the migrant influx is testing that identity, with locals like Ali Amar rejecting newcomers he said have “brought chaos” to the city.” “I am Muslim. I am Spanish. I am a patriot,” he said. “These people have no business being here.”

Rival German lawmakers plot pact to shut out EU far right Niclas Herbst and René Repasi want to shake up how the center-right and left work together. But will their bosses agree? By MAX GRIERAin BRUSSELS Photo-Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO Top lawmakers in the European Parliament want to replace the fragile alliance supporting Ursula von der Leyen with a formal German-style centrist coalition — over fears her group relies too much on the far right to pass legislation. Niclas Herbst and René Repasi, the respective parliamentary leaders of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil’s center-left Social Democrats — the two parties that govern Germany — said they want their pan-European political families to strike a deal to push through policies as a united front rather than bicker over issues they disagree on. In what would be a striking reversal of how their two groups have drifted apart, they want formal governance structures to resolve disputes and take turns promoting their priorities. “If we don’t have trust, and if we don’t find good solutions, if we do not deliver for the people, the populists and extremists on the left and on the right will decide,” Herbst said, sitting in an armchair next to Repasi, in the center-left lawmaker’s office during a joint interview — itself a stunning case of two rival politicians wanting to put their differences aside to fight what they see as a common enemy. According to a POLITICO poll of polls, the three centrist groups are on course to lose 49 seats at the next election. The far right’s gains in the 2024 EU election disrupted the longstanding balance between the two political groups that drove lawmaking for decades. The EPP, of which the CDU is a member, has increasingly relied on right-wing majorities due to fraying cooperation with the S&D, to which the German Social Democrats belong. With polls signaling further populist gains across the bloc, Herbst and Repasi warned that unless the center repairs the relationship, more extreme voices will increasingly call the shots in Brussels. The Herbst-Repasi idea would also help reduce European Commission President von der Leyen’s political stress. Rivalry between the two centrist groups has made Parliament votes on some of her biggest policies increasingly unpredictable ― such as in January when MEPs sent her EU-Mercosur trade deal for judicial review. A coalition agreement would restore stability, giving the Commission and capitals greater confidence in Parliament’s ability to deliver von der Leyen’s program, the MEPs said. Continued “frustration” and “distrust” stemming from the EPP striking deals with the far-right could eventually drive the two groups completely apart, triggering a “political catastrophe” because the whole Brussels system would be paralyzed, Repasi said. ‘Basis of trust’ With far-right and far-left forces on track to make major gains at the 2029 EU election, Herbst warned that failing to work together would give “even more ammunition to the populists from the left and the right,”allowing them to keep scoring “easy wins” in Parliament. “If mistrust continues, it will only be amplified by the 2029 elections,” his center-left counterpart added. “The need to talk to each other is going to be even bigger.” He said a potential pact could serve as the “model” for the next legislature. Since June 2024, the EPP has increasingly joined forces with far-right groups to pass key legislation, including on deportations, cuts to green reporting requirements for businesses, and delays and rollbacks to a deforestation law. The group has also relied on far-right votes to shape the agenda in Parliament’s decision-making bodies. Borrowing from the German model, the two MEPs said the two main groups should work together more formally and no longer rely on negotiations file-by-file by individual lawmakers. “If a trade-off is not possible within a file, we need to find a trade-off across files,” Repasi said. Partners need to agree on concessions that are “difficult to digest” for each other. This would create “this joint feeling of mutual trust.”Compromises on which group gets the leading voice in different areas could be struck across files in advance, giving the two sides an incentive to stick together. The two MEPs also floated the idea of creating a new “governance structure” body to steer coalition disputes and allocate who gets which win, similar to the coalition committee between the CDU and SPD in Berlin. Ursula von der Leyen delivers a speech during a plenary session at the Strasbourg European Parliament on May 20, 2026. | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images “We need more binding agreements on who will take the lead on which question,” said Herbst, who defended a deal but rejected the term ‘coalition,’ arguing it has different meanings across the EU. “Everybody needs to have some successes.” The EPP is the biggest group and hence needs to get its fair share of “wins,” though, he said. Will it happen? Whether Herbst and Repasi’s plan has legs depends on political will across the two groups — and there doesn’t appear to be much. “This is nothing new,” said a spokesperson for S&D chief Iratxe García. “It was already on the negotiation table in 2024.” A spokesperson for EPP head Manfred Weber didn’t reply to a request for comment. Herbst said Weber could be open to a broader deal, provided it reflected the rightward shift seen at the 2024 EU election.After that vote, the two groups, along with liberal Renew, signed a two-page agreement vaguely promising to cooperate. That didn’t prevent the EPP from working with the far-right.  The plan’s key weakness is that lawmakers have fewer incentives to follow the party line than national lawmakers. Unlike in countries, Parliament cannot be dissolved and failure to maintain a majority does not bring down the Commission. Members of the European parliament take part in an electronical vote. | Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP via Getty Images That problem was on display when an EPP-S&D deal to cut red tape for businesses collapsed in October when center-left MEPs rebelled against their leadership, prompting the EPP to vote with the far-right. Involving more MEPs in coalition negotiations would create greater ownership and discipline among lawmakers, Repasi said. In thinly veiled criticism of the groups’ leadership, he argued that the “previous way of how politics was done by two or three people at the very top that decided everything has just come to its limits.” Forced together Despite the two groups’ growing mistrust, they will soon have to find common ground on issues such as plans to water down a combustion-engine ban, a package simplifying environmental rules, including the contentious emissions trading system, a revamp of the EU border agency, Frontex, and the EU’s notoriously thorny seven-year budget. “You might have some success with the far left or the far right on certain issues, but in the bigger picture we have far more in common with liberals and social democrats,” Herbst said. There’s also the matter of who gets the Parliament presidency. MEPs expect the EPP’s Roberta Metsola to seek a third term as president, but the S&D insist it’s their turn. Failure to find a common candidate would expose the proposed centrist pact’s weakness before it even gets off the ground, Repasi said. Herbst agreed the two groups should agree on a common candidate. The German tradition The proposal comes as the leadership of both groups tries to beef up informal relations between top lawmakers, following souring relations between the two chiefs, Weber and García.  Asked why they were taking the initiative rather than relying on the group leaders, both pointed to Germany’s long tradition of grand coalitions. “It is good that those who have made positive experiences with this sort of governance try to translate it into the European level … and therefore the impulse is coming from the two German heads of delegations,” Repasi said. Herbst said he hadn’t directly consulted with Merz about the coalition plan, but that it was important to Berlin to have “good cooperation.” For his part, Klingbeil has been “informed” of the initiative, Repasi said, adding “it is also in the interest of the German government” that things agreed in Berlin are followed through in the EU Parliament.  “Let’s not talk too much about the past or personal relationships but look to the future,” Herbst said.

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A federation of European textile associations called Tuesday for an import fee of 10 euros on fashion imports, the latest effort to stem the flood of ultra-cheap competition mainly from China. Speaking with FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney, Dr Sheng Lu, Professor at the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware, says that it remains to be seen just "to what extent such measures would push groups like Shein to change their business model", adding that fast-fashion retailers may have to start to contend with "consumer fatigue".

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