Spain’s Prime Minister finds no word of regret at 37 dead migrants in Melilla. Instead, he praises his security forces. It is no longer just the far right who are destroying the continent’s values.
As is well known, it was the AfD that launched the brutal push, which shattered Europe’s values, to defend the EU’s external borders against migrants, if necessary by force of arms. But the never-ending deaths in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, as well as the most recent images from the Spanish exclave of Melilla, show that live ammunition is not necessary at all. Even without it, people regularly die a violent death because they try to cross Europe’s borders.
The normalization of this dying usually happens slowly, you accept it and look away. But this weekend Europe reached a new abyss: Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood in front of the microphone and praised – yes, praised – the “extraordinary work of our security forces” in view of the alleged 37 deaths on the border between Morocco and Melilla. They had successfully defended themselves against a “violent attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” and, as Sánchez emphasized, they did so in “coordinated cooperation” with the Moroccan security forces.
Not a word of regret from Sánchez, who once as opposition leader himself had sharply denounced dying at the EU’s external borders. No announcement to determine the causes of death in the 37 victims. Instead, clumsy war rhetoric and flattery towards Rabat.
How low has morale sunk in Europe for a left-wing, self-defined progressive politician to speak so callously about the deaths of the unarmed? That he approves of border guards piling up piles of half-dead and dead people in front of them, as documented by video footage from the border in Melilla, and thus describing the incident as “well resolved”? That not a word of sympathy crosses his lips? Things are bad for Europe – and it’s not just the avowed xenophobia that are ruining its values.