Spain Goes Merkel

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, February 01, 2026

 

The decision by Angela Merkel, the former “leader of the free world” (or so we were told) to fling open Germany’s doors was a catastrophe for her country, and not exactly a gift to the rest of Europe. Her motives for doing so seem to have been a mix of panic and narcissism, but they may be more praiseworthy than those behind the latest maneuver by scandal-plagued Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s socialist prime minister.

 

The Guardian:

 

Spain’s socialist-led coalition government has approved a decree it said would regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, rejecting the anti-migration policies and rhetoric prevalent across much of Europe.

 

The decree, expected to come into effect in April, will apply to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and people in Spain with irregular status. To qualify for regularisation, applicants will have to prove they do not have a criminal record and had lived in Spain for at least five months — or had sought international protection — before 31 December 2025.

 

Announcing the decision after Tuesday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Elma Saiz, Spain’s minister for inclusion, social security and migration, said it was a “historic day”, adding the initiative was designed to “break the bureaucratic barriers of the past.”

 

Jack Davey, writing in The Critic:

 

The measure will grant rights to migrants without papers who have no criminal record and who had been in the country for at least five months before 31 December 2025. Its consequences will be enormous. Official estimates state that over 500,000 people could be included under the amnesty, but the true number will probably be far larger. The best estimates state that Spain has 840,000 irregular migrants. However, a Podemos source told El País that the number of regularised migrants could well exceed one million by the end of the process.

 

Five whole months!

 

According to Davey, the majority of those subject to the amnesty will be from Colombia, Peru, and Honduras, part of a wider “Latin Americanization” of Spain. That’s likely to be the case, but the amnesty’s beneficiaries will include contingents from all over the world.

 

Of course, Spain has not had an immigration amnesty for years and years and years, well, 2005 anyway, when 576,000 people were amnestied.

 

To be fair, Sánchez (unlike Merkel, whose views shifted around) has consistently supported large-scale immigration, partly because of its supposed economic benefits. Then again, as a socialist, he is no stranger to obsolete economic notions.

 

But something else may be at play. Sanchez heads a government with a tiny majority dependent on support from the far left and regional parties. At the moment, he is lagging in the polls (elections are due in 2027), making it a surprising moment to force through a move so controversial that it had to be passed by executive action rather than via a parliamentary vote. Among those pressing for an amnesty had been Spain’s Catholic hierarchy, which argued that it would be an be an act “of democratic maturity,” making the fact that passing this measure involved bypassing the legislature a touch ironic, but there we are.

 

Davey reckons that a part of Sánchez’s game was routine politicking. He had handed out some favors to the regional parties; now it was the far left’s turn. But was something else going on?

 

Davey:

 

[Spain] is in the midst of a right-wing surge, much of it driven by anger over immigration. The Spanish nationalist Vox party is on the cusp of reaching 20 per cent and is taking votes from across the political spectrum.

 

The center-right Partido Popular, which has long been the dominant party on the Spanish right, also opposes the amnesty and is still comfortably ahead of Vox, but Casey writes that:

 

By adding even more fuel to the immigration debate, Sánchez is stoking the Vox fire so he can present himself as the only barrier between them and power. In 2023, he survived against miraculous odds by presenting himself as the alternative to a Partido Popular unable to function with Vox. Despite seemingly constant crises, the same trick could well work again. . .

 

In a nation already beset by a housing crisis, overstretched infrastructure. . . . Pedro Sánchez’s strategy seems, at best, a huge gamble. The Prime Minister appears to be engineering a crisis so large that the only alternative to his rule is a radicalised right, with Vox either in government or close to it. The stakes may be high — but that’s how Sánchez likes them.

 

That is speculative, to be sure. But with presidential elections due in France next year too, in which similar issues will be in play, Europe’s 2027 is already looking . . . interesting.