🇺🇳 Mr. Sánchez Goes to New York

No open border. Car confusion aside, the Interior Ministry has budgeted €9m to reinforce Ceuta's maritime border, extending the breakwater and installing a permanent floating system capable of suspending a net down to the seabed.

• It would replace the emergency 500-meter floating barrier installed after July’s mass crossing — parts of which have already been damaged by the sea (yikes).

• At last. For the first time since the crisis started, PM Sánchez said Morocco’s border controls “failed” during the crossing and that Spain had demanded “answers and actions” from Morocco. This is a big change of tune after weeks of avoiding direct criticism of Rabat, whose cooperation Spain kinda needs to prevent new crossings and accept returned migrants.

Not a minor problem. Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres says the immediate sticking point is the roughly 3,000 minors still in Ceuta. The national government wants those who cannot be reunited with their families (some already have been) distributed among regions on the mainland.

• The famous “efecto llamada". PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Ceuta president Juan Jesús Vivas (also PP) oppose that solution and argue that transferring them could encourage further crossings.

The scares continue. Intelligence services said they had spotted online calls for another mass crossing into Ceuta and Melilla for this Wednesday — the same day Morocco (an authoritarian regime) was holding elections — as well as reports of migrants moving north toward the border. In the end, it seems, nothing happened.

And therein lies Ceuta’s rather terrifying problem. Spain can spend millions extending walls and deploying police, but preventing another July depends largely on what happens on the Moroccan side of the border. 👀

3. 👮 Why are fake cops kidnapping people in Barcelona?

Barcelona has gone seriously Narcos recently. In broad daylight Saturday afternoon, two cars cut off a third vehicle on the AP-7 highway near Montornès del Vallès. Five men in black, faces covered and wearing police vests, jumped out, dragged a man from the back seat of the third car — bloody-faced, clothes in shreds, shoes still in the car — beat him senseless, and drove off. Other drivers, baffled and scared, filmed the whole thing (the videos went viral, duh). Hours later, the victim turned up bruised but alive in Sant Llorenç Savall. He did not wish to discuss what had happened.

• Three makes a trend. This was the third such incident in Catalonia in less than a month.

It started on Sept. 7 in Gavà. A motorcyclist was riding down Carrer del Pou when occupants of another car opened fire on him, then hauled his wounded body into their trunk and drove away. The Mossos d’Esquadra found him hours later, seriously hurt, abandoned in Sabadell.

• Then came the AP-7 episode — the one that went viral.

And then, barely 48 hours after that, at 2 a.m. on Monday morning, a guy in Barcelona’s Sant Martí de Provençals neighborhood started shouting for help as a group of men forced him into a vehicle. Witnesses called 112 (911 is cooler, IMHO, though 1 + 1 = 2), but the Mossos couldn’t catch the car. He was found hours later, wounded, near Salt (Girona).

The police theory in all three cases is the same. They believe these are ajustes de cuentas — paybacks — between drug trafficking gangs. The AP-7 victim has prior drug convictions and had recently been released from prison; El Español floated the Albanian mafia as a possible actor. Technically, the Mossos (Catalonia’s cops) note, these aren’t even kidnappings because no ransom was demanded, so they’re classified as illegal detention, possibly with the added charge of impersonating public authority. Most of all, they look like ways to send a message.

• The biggest investigative obstacle? The victims won’t talk. And police acknowledge these incidents are crazy underreported. Most score-settling between criminal networks stays inside the gangs — what happens in the mob stays in the mob, right? — and nobody calls 112 (or 911, damnit!).

4. 🤑 Wall Street has decided who it's voting for

Money talks in the U.S., and it’s shouting at Spain. Two events this week drove home which side American money is on in Spanish politics — and no, Mr Handsome, it’s not yours.

• First off, the bad news for the current government. According to Spain’s Secretariat of State for Commerce, U.S. investors have increased the amount of money they’ve taken out of Spain by 386% in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year. As in, they’ve yanked out €3.85bn in just six months.

U.S. money ran away. To put that in perspective, in all of 2025 €4.6bn in U.S. money was “disinvested”, itself a 30-year record. So American money is leaving Spain faster than a tourist fleeing a plate of oreja a la plancha.

• But why? The reasons cited were the Sánchez government’s deteriorating relationship with the Trump administration, and regulatory barriers — particularly restrictions on electricity grid access that are choking off investment in data centers and other cash-money sectors.

Now, the good news. Well, for the PP’s stumble-prone (and dependably boring) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Goldman Sachs this week called Spain a remarkable fiscal “exception.”

• But why (Pt. 2)? They projected that a PP-Vox government after the 2027 elections would cut Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio by five percentage points, to 95%, by 2030 — while debt rises everywhere else. Basically, France, the U.S., the U.K., Italy, and Germany all look like sloppy overspenders in comparison.

• Spain is a good boy. Spain is currently paying 3.9% on its 10-year bonds; France is paying 4.46%. Spain’s Ibex 35 stock index is up 31% over the past year, while France’s CAC 40 is up a measly 4%.

• More Wall Street love for the righties. Nomura piled on, saying markets would greet a PP-Vox coalition “positively,” given its likely focus on deficit reduction and growth-friendly policies.

Not just that they’re on the right — it’s that they’re “stable”. The contrast Goldman draws is that Spain, with a probable clear majority incoming, represents stability. But France, potentially about to hand the presidency to long-time nutter Marine Le Pen — but without a parliamentary majority — represents chaos.

Goldman’s nightmare scenario? It’s that Feijóo falls short of a majority with Vox and Spain gets another messy hung parliament. In that case, they warn, investor confidence in Spain’s fiscal story collapses, and all bets are off.

• Basically, Wall Street has a horse in Spain’s 2027 race. And it’s wearing blue.

5. 🏛️ Now they’ve found a Roman theater under Málaga