The French Dispatch

Nobody Is Going to War Over Ceuta or Melilla

Julien Hoez — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:01:48 GMT

Guards standing on the border between Morocco and Ceuta (Source: Guardia Civil)

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Every time Ceuta is targeted with one of Morocco’s hybrid attacks, and every time the lives of migrants are abused to pressure the Spanish government, someone always asks whether Spain and Morocco are heading for war.

They don’t care about the problems with this type of geopolitical posturing. They don’t care about the needless endangering and loss of human life. They don’t even care about who is doing what. They just want to posture in the news or on social media about how powerful Morocco is, how powerful Spain is, and how x, y or z could annihilate a, b and c in retribution for perceived or real slights.

Naturally, with the ongoing aftermath of the Ceuta crisis, the question resurfaced within hours of the July crossings, with journalists and keyboard warriors alike spreading their messages of peace and love across the internet; and once a US congressional committee waded into the question of Spanish sovereignty, it stopped being confined to comment sections.

Naturally, it also happens to be the wrong question, or rather it collapses two separate questions into one. Whether Rabat will keep using migration as leverage over Madrid is not in doubt: it has done so four times since 2021 and will continue to engage in hybrid warfare. Whether either government would risk actual armed conflict over two North African cities is a different matter, and the historical record answers it plainly.

None of what follows is a celebration of European or Spanish strength, or an invitation to read the numbers as a scoreboard. That framing is exactly the problem it's meant to correct. Morocco has nationalists who profit from portraying Rabat as an unafraid rising power. Washington has acquired its own, who have adopted Ceuta as a front in a culture war that has nothing to do with it, using the crisis as a purely punitive attack on Pedro Sánchez. Meanwhile, Europe's far right needs a foreign threat to sell domestic politics it otherwise couldn't. All three are currently misreading, or deliberately misrepresenting, a pattern of coercion that has stayed remarkably contained for two decades. Setting that record straight, not tallying tanks, is the point of what follows.

To begin with, it’s possible to set up frameworks to better understand the likelihood or probability of a conflict, but it’s not bulletproof and it’s not a crystal ball. The history of geopolitics is filled with rash decisions that make little sense and are looked upon in the eyes of history with bafflement and confusion.

Any question about whether two states might fight, with all of the myriad of reasons, benefits from being broken into smaller stages rather than treated as binary yes or no.

A useful model runs on four rungs:

Diplomatic pressure – Protest notes, recalled ambassadors, sharpened rhetoric. The baseline state of any contested-sovereignty relationship, present continuously between Madrid and Rabat since independence. It escalates only when one side judges words are no longer being taken seriously
Coercion short of force – A costly signal that stops short of combat, most often trade restrictions or, in this case, a loosened border. The clearest precedent is Belarus’s 2021 push of migrants toward Poland and Lithuania, which the European Council formally condemned as a “hybrid attack,” a label that has stuck for this kind of coercion ever since. The point isn’t the crossing itself but what it demonstrates: Rabat’s ability to impose real cost on Spain at will. This is where every Ceuta and Melilla crisis since 2021 has played out, and where each has been resolved once the signal landed
Limited use of force – An operation small and reversible enough that neither side has to call it war, seizing an islet, a border skirmish, a naval intercept. Reaching this rung means coercion has failed to extract the concession sought, or one side judges the other won’t actually shoot back. Perejil in 2002 is the only time this ladder has been climbed this high, and it was resolved within days precisely because both sides moved fast to keep it there.
Full-on interstate war – Mobilised forces, combat, contested territory. States arrive here only when no bargain both sides trust can be found, typically because one side doubts the other’s resolve, or because a closing window makes fighting now look better than fighting later. Neither condition holds between Madrid and Rabat: Spanish resolve has never been in doubt, and Morocco faces no closing window that rewards acting before talking. This rung has never been reached.

Every crisis since 2002 mapped onto the same four rungs. Only one has ever gone past the second (Source: Julien Hoez)

That “why” has a well-established answer in the study of interstate conflict. States rarely go to war because grievances accumulate past some threshold; they go to war when no bargain both sides prefer to fighting can be found and trusted.

Sometimes this can be because one side doubts the other’s resolve and miscalculates a fight it would have avoided had it known the truth. More often it’s a commitment problem: a rising power doubts a declining one will honour today’s terms once the balance shifts, or doubts that the opponent can defend itself with sufficient material or manpower that would prevent unacceptable losses.

So, it fights while the fighting is still favourable. Occasionally the prize itself can’t be split: a capital, a city, a holy site, a currency union, and no bargain exists that would allow complete ownership over the goal in the first place.

Morocco’s claim to Ceuta and Melilla clears this particular hurdle easily: sovereignty over an inhabited city isn’t divisible the way a trade dispute is, particularly not one found within what it considers to be its sovereign territory.

What Morocco has never fully cleared is the next two rungs on the ladder: Rabat has never doubted Madrid’s resolve to defend the enclaves with military force if necessary, and it has never faced a closing window that made waiting look riskier than acting now. Absent either failure, coercion below the threshold of force stays the rational choice, which is exactly what the record below shows it choosing, four times over.

Four crises since 2021, one weapon in two decades

The Perejil crisis is the exception that proves the rule. When Moroccan marines occupied the uninhabited islet off Ceuta in July 2002, Spain retook it within a week using a small commando unit during Operation Romeo-Sierra, without a single casualty on either side.

Washington, under more intellectual leadership than today, brokered a return to the pre-crisis status quo within days, and Madrid’s government publicly thanked the United States for its role, with ambassadors restored to their positions the following January. In over two decades of recurring friction between Madrid and Rabat, it remains the only episode that involved anyone firing up a helicopter or a potential risk of life rather than loosening a border fence.

Everything since then has stayed several rungs lower. In May 2021, Morocco relaxed border controls after Spain admitted Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali for hospital treatment, and roughly 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta over two days. The dispute was resolved through policy rather than force: Madrid reversed its position on Western Sahara the following spring.

In June 2022, around 2,000 people attempted the Melilla fence; the official Moroccan toll rose from an initial 18 to 23 confirmed dead, with Moroccan human rights groups citing higher figures still. That crisis, too, resolved through diplomacy rather than escalation, arriving as it did a month after Rabat and Madrid had already patched up relations. A smaller episode followed in August 2024, when several hundred people used fog cover to swim into Ceuta.

Then came the most recent flashpoint in July 2026.

The scale keeps rising. The mechanism never changes (Source: Julien Hoez)

Spanish authorities said 72,000 people crossed over two days, considerably more than any previous episode, with at least 67 confirmed dead by the time Spain began installing a floating barrier off Tarajal beach. The toll continued climbing as recovery operations proceeded in both Spanish and Moroccan waters, reaching at least 141 dead by early August, more than double the initial count and Morocco’s deadliest migration disaster on record. The mechanism was the same as 2021: a loosened border, a diplomatic grievance behind it, a return to the status quo once the political point had been made. What was different was the scale, and, as it turned out, the audience watching from Washington.

Coercion is cheap, whereas war would not be

The reason Morocco reaches for migration and hybrid warfare rather than anything sharper is not squeamishness; it’s arithmetic.

Spain’s defence budget runs to roughly $34.5bn against Morocco’s $6.2bn, and that comparison understates the real gap between the two states: Spain is one of 27 EU member states bound by Article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union, the bloc’s mutual defence clause. It has been invoked once, by France after the 2015 Paris attacks, and it does not trigger automatically.

However, the simple reality is that the EU-27 spent €418bn on defence in 2025 alone, more than seventy times what Morocco spends on its entire military in a year, and that is the backdrop against which any Moroccan planner has to weigh an escalation of the Perejil precedent.

Five measures, three actors, one lopsided picture. (Source: Julien Hoez)

The trade relationship tells the same story from a different angle. Morocco sends 22.5% of its exports to Spain alone, more than to any other country including France, and Spain has become Morocco’s largest African trading partner, worth over €22bn a year. Widen the lens to the EU as a whole and the exposure grows further still: total EU-Morocco goods trade reached €62bn in 2025, with Spain alone accounting for well over a third of Morocco’s trade with the bloc. Migration pressure is a lever Rabat can pull and release at will, deniable and reversible within days. Losing access to the Spanish or European market is neither, and Rabat has spent two decades demonstrating that it knows the difference.

What Rabat stands to lose is a much bigger share of its own economy than anyone backing Madrid stands to lose of theirs (source: Julien Hoez)

None of this restraint is happening by accident, or out of pure strategic patience either. As I argued after the emergency Justice and Home Affairs meeting on 4 August, and discussed live with Dave Keating from Spain that same week, Brussels' instinct throughout this crisis has been damage control rather than accountability: a four-day reversal from criticising Madrid to closing ranks around it, Morocco never named in the official readout, and the Commission reportedly offering Rabat more money rather than answers.

That is not the behaviour of an actor confident enough to escalate. It is the behaviour of one that would rather pay to make a problem go away than find out what happens if it doesn't.

What Brussels has and has not used.

The EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, in force since December 2023, lets the bloc restrict a coercing country’s access to the single market, tariffs, procurement, investment, in response to political pressure applied through trade. It has never been triggered, requires a minimum of six months to activate, and is designed, in the Commission’s own language, to work best if it never has to be used at all.

Article 42.7 sits alongside it as the harder-edged option: a mutual defence obligation that requires the attacked state to invoke it first, with no automatic collective response.

Neither has come anywhere near Ceuta. Nobody in Brussels has needed to reach for either, because nobody in Rabat has given them a reason to.

Congress didn’t arm Morocco. It told Rabat the claim now has friends

What actually shifted this summer sits in Washington rather than Rabat or Madrid. A House Appropriations Committee report accompanying the 2027 State Department funding bill stated that Ceuta and Melilla are “located in Moroccan territory,” the first time any chamber of the US Congress has cast doubt in writing on Spanish sovereignty over the enclaves.

The House passed the underlying bill 217 to 209 on 15 July, before the crossings began, and the report effectively carries no legal force. Official US policy has not moved: Washington still recognises the cities as Spanish. The same bill directs $40m toward Moroccan security programmes, well under 1% of Morocco’s own annual defence budget and not remotely enough to alter the balance described above.

What has changed is the relationship the report landed inside.

Spain and the United States have spent most of 2026 in their coldest situation in decades. In February, Sánchez refused US forces access to Spanish bases for the strikes on Iran and closed Spanish airspace to the aircraft involved, and in March, Trump ordered a halt to all trade with Spain, a threat that went unfulfilled but was never formally withdrawn either. Spain remains the only NATO member that has not committed to the alliance’s 5% of GDP spending target, which Sánchez has called “unreasonable and counterproductive,” and Madrid spent the same stretch deepening ties with Beijing, the prime minister’s fourth visit to China in four years came in April.

A brief thaw occurred in July: a cordial handshake at the World Cup final in New Jersey, after talks at a summit in Ankara, but this level of public friction doesn’t dissolve over one football match. A House committee willing to question Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla isn’t an isolated event, it is a signal that is received very loudly by those who would benefit from it the most.

The military calculus hasn’t moved. What has moved is the political one. A claim that spent two decades confined to Rabat’s own rhetoric and a scattering of sympathetic think-tank essays has now appeared, in writing, inside a committee report of the world’s most powerful legislature.

Spain’s legal position is unaffected: it rests on possession predating the modern Moroccan state by centuries, and no US administration has changed its recognition of Spanish sovereignty due to the domino effect it would have across its alliances and relationships.

What Moroccan officials gained is a talking point they didn’t have in May, and what future advocates of the claim gained is an institutional citation to point to instead of an op-ed. Normalisation is a slower, cheaper form of leverage than anything involving a fence or a flag, and it is exactly the kind of leverage this Congress has shown itself willing to hand out.

The bill itself is still sitting with the Senate, unresolved, and no secretary of state under any recent administration has agreed to broker talks on the cities’ status, whatever a single House committee chooses to note in a report nobody outside Brussels and Rabat had heard of a year ago.

The question worth tracking from here is not whether Madrid and Rabat go to war over Ceuta, they will not, but whether this kind of language outlives the Trump administration that produced it. A House report is reversible. A precedent, once set, rarely is.

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Live from Spain and Brussels: why EU leaders don't want to know what's behind the Ceuta crisis

Julien Hoez — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:31:39 GMT

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EU home affairs ministers recently held an emergency video summit on the Ceuta crisis, but by the time they met, nearly all 72,000 people who crossed from Morocco last Thursday had already been sent back. Not one made it to the EU mainland.

And as is usual when there are incredibly ridiculous political situations in the EU, and I sat down yesterday for a Substack Live to unpack what happened and why it matters. Here’s what stood out:

The obvious question: why, if the evidence is to be believed that Moroccan authorities let 72,000 people cross in the first place, was this point never raised
The summit looked more like damage control than a real response, papering over a clear lack of EU unity
Morocco wasn’t mentioned once, reportedly because Spain didn’t want to risk retaliation from Rabat
On the ground in Spain, Dave found fury at what people see as a total absence of EU solidarity
In another piece I wrote in The French Dispatch , I broke down the case that this was a hybrid attack by Morocco, and that European governments are choosing to pay Morocco off rather than investigate or retaliate

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Dave and Julien episode if we didn’t touch upon American intransigence: we discussed the leaked US State Department memo suggesting Washington could back rival claims to European overseas territories, including Ceuta and the Falklands, as retaliation for Europe staying out of the Iran War.

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Gulf Stream Blues

Ceuta exposes Europe's chronic lack of unity

Thursday was a dark day for the European Union, and not for the reasons that Europe’s far right and their backers in Washington would have you believe. 60,000 migrants invaded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, located on the African coast and surrounded by Morocco, in the largest single-surge border violation in EU history. That was followed by the largest …

18 days ago · 18 likes · Dave Keating

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European leaders embarrassed themselves over Ceuta

Julien Hoez — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:02:49 GMT

Pedro Sánchez announcing increased security in Ceuta (Source: Pedro Sánchez)

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Within 24 hours, Spain had returned the very large majority of the over 60,000 people who crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over 30 and 31 July, with, in the Council’s own assessment, no onward movement to mainland Spain or other member states.

This was a serious and genuinely impressive operational achievement: the crowd that arrived at the fence in a single day came close to Ceuta’s entire population of around 80,000. Guardia Civil and the army secured the perimeter, Madrid rapidly mobilised the extra capacity necessary to deal with the issue, and after calling the situation “unacceptable”, Commission President von der Leyen appointed two commissioners to help coordinate the European-level response, an acknowledgement that this was a shared European problem rather than a Spanish one.

And yet, as we’re used to by now, none of that stopped several fellow EU governments from treating Madrid, rather than Rabat, as the problem, with the common denominator being a right-wing lean and political desperation.

Zero solidarity, while the toll climbed

Within 24 hours of the breakthrough, and after the situation had effectively come to an end, Italy had imposed border checks on travellers arriving from Spain, and by the end of the week Italian officials were floating shutting Spain out of Schengen altogether.

France’s interior minister, meanwhile, ordered extra checks along the Pyrenees, a moderate step compared with what came next. Jordan Bardella, whose far-right Patriots for Europe group sits well to the right of most national governments in Brussels, wrote to Parliament President Roberta Metsola demanding an emergency debate on what he called the “failure of the European Union’s migration policies”.

Nigel Farage, that strange British man who made Brexit happen and who is allergic to both accountability and geography, told his own followers the crossings had “invaded” Ceuta, and warned, inaccurately, that the people involved would soon be crossing the Channel into Britain, a country that is not in Schengen and roughly a thousand kilometres from Ceuta.

A breakdown of the letter signatories in the European Council (Source: Julien Hoez)

And to add to the dramatic effect: some silly people from Fox News decided that Ceuta was actually in northern Spain, somewhere near Navarra and the Basque Country, because why not just transpose northern Africa into Europe for the sake of some clickbait and political capital.

By the time Pedro Sánchez called the reaction a “selfish, polarising and unlawful” response from European allies, the confirmed death toll of what appears to have been either hybrid warfare or sheer incompetence from the Moroccan government, had already risen from 67 on Friday to 72 by Sunday, according to Spain’s government delegate to Ceuta; the region’s own morgue reported 88 bodies received, while Morocco’s interior ministry, working from its own figures, confirmed just 11.

He was right, and the following week proved it.

A crisis made in Rabat, not Madrid

Why this looks like hybrid warfare, not a migration failure

Morocco has used the Ceuta crossing point to pressure Madrid before. In May 2021, Rabat eased its border controls for two days after Spain treated Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali in hospital without prior notice, and roughly 8,000 people crossed in 48 hours. Spain’s own defence minister called it blackmail at the time.

Within a year, Madrid had abandoned its neutrality on Western Sahara in favour of Morocco’s autonomy plan, a reversal widely read as the price of that episode. Rabat denies engineering July’s crossing and blames overwhelmed local police instead. The scale, the timing, and Moroccan forces standing down at the fence for the second time in five years make that denial hard to credit.

I’m not alone in reading this abhorrent situation this way. The European Council on Foreign Relations warned that failing to back Spain risks “encouraging Morocco and others to keep using migration as a tool of coercion”. Seen against that backdrop, Italy’s border checks and Bardella’s letter amounted to a reward for Rabat, delivered for free, by politicians who call themselves defenders of Europe’s borders and people, all while undermining the one member state that was actually single-handedly doing this while being stabbed in the back.

A four-day climbdown

By 4 August, when Irish minister Jim O’Callaghan convened an informal video conference of EU home affairs ministers, the ridiculous anti-Spanish posture had been completely reversed.

The same bloc that could not be bothered to show solidarity four days earlier now recorded that member states were united in expressing strong solidarity with Spain, commending the “swift and effective” Spanish response. Italy’s border checks were quietly dropped, and Bardella’s promised emergency debate never happened.

Notably, nobody but the most ridiculous far-right influencers brought up Schengen suspension again.

This reversal took four days and needed no real debate. Governments that were imposing border checks and floating Schengen suspension on 1 August were praising Spanish competence by the 4th, presumably because basic common sense and geographical knowledge were discovered.

The rising death toll and evidence of this being Morocco’s hybrid warfare against our Union also helped to go some way in rendering the original position politically untenable.

But, regardless of the positive result, we need to call it what it is: a cowardly climbdown, staged in public, by right-wing and panicked governments that picked the wrong target, used the wrong logic, and then had to unpick their own words on the record.

Knowing and not saying

Ministers committed to reinforcing returns and deepening partnerships with third countries, the same language used after every previous Ceuta crisis, and deferred anything harder to a further ministerial meeting and the European Council in October, ten weeks away.

Morocco is not named once in the readout, with this omission looking less like an information gap than a decision. Spanish media reported, citing security sources, that the National Intelligence Centre had warned the Interior Ministry several times of a possible mass crossing in the weeks beforehand, tied to Morocco’s Throne Day, but Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has denied receiving any warning of a surge on that scale.

Either way, a Council communiqué drafted days after that story broke, and that still avoids the word Morocco, reads like a choice to keep a fragile but necessary relationship out of the public record rather than a genuine gap in what ministers understood.

No minister mentioned the Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation, the EU’s own framework for member states facing migration deliberately instrumentalised by a third state. Its relevant provisions became applicable on 1 July 2026, four weeks before Ceuta.

The Anti-Coercion Instrument is often raised alongside it, but that tool is built around trade and economic coercion rather than migration, a stretch to invoke here even though Brussels has spent this year weighing its first-ever use against Washington over Greenland. The instrumentalisation framework requires no such stretch: it exists for precisely this scenario, and nobody in the room on 4 August used it, or the word it was built to describe.

Spain’s bilateral dependence on Rabat, the same dependence that let a border be opened and closed like a tap in 2021 and again this July, is not on the table for reform either.

The anti-EU camp has humiliated itself into silence, and deservedly so. Rabat, the actual author of the crisis, has not yet been asked to answer for anything.

Not only this, but our Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has embarrassed herself as much as any of them.

That silence did not start with the ministers. The day before they convened, she had already answered the accountability question herself, in writing. Sánchez had complained privately to the Commission president on Saturday about the lack of solidarity from fellow member states; her reply, seen by Reuters, did not raise Rabat’s conduct at all. She, instead, proposed rewarding it.

Von der Leyen called Morocco “an important strategic partner” and offered to enhance early-warning systems and increase technical and financial support to the same government suspected of directing sixty thousand people into a crossing that had, by Monday, killed at least seventy-two of them. The Commission president who had called the crisis unacceptable on Friday spent Monday drafting a bigger cheque for the state she was too careful to name as its cause.

This is not diplomacy. It is reward.

She did not mention fisheries access under the EU-Morocco partnership, or attaching conditions to the cooperation funding Rabat already receives, both tools TFD flagged after the 2021 crisis. Nor did she raise the instrumentalisation framework her own Commission spent two years building for precisely this situation.

Every government that attacked Spain in public has already had to eat its words, in public, at the ministerial table. Von der Leyen never attacked anyone, and has faced no reckoning at all, because writing a cheque does not generate headlines the way a Schengen threat does. She had the authority to make Rabat pay for this. She chose to pay Rabat instead.

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I had the great pleasure to head to Prague this week to take part in the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum, and had the chance to catch up with a friend of the Dispatch, from , for a live video recorded on the sidelines.

As you’ll hear in this video, Thursday set the tone for the whole event.

A session featuring former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former US Defence Secretary Mark Esper addressed Europe’s new security reality, which is the polite way of saying: what happens when you can no longer assume Washington has your back.

Both men agreed the dependency had gone on too long. Rasmussen pushed for a formalised Coalition of the Willing within NATO; Esper preferred expanding the existing Joint Expeditionary Force rather than risk further fracturing the alliance.

They found common ground on Ukraine’s NATO membership, arguing for the German 1955 model, with Article 5 applying only to government-controlled territory. Rasmussen went further, making the case that Europe had thrown away its best leverage during the Iran conflict by immediately declaring it wasn’t its war.

What was harder to watch was the broader conference atmosphere around US-EU relations. The official discourse from established politicians was notably managed: resilient partnership, shared values, transatlantic cooperation intact. However, the audience did not seem persuaded, and it appeared that there was a gap between what the podium says and what the people in the seats actually believe, and Prague made that visible.

Later that afternoon, I was on stage with French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad, ECFR director Mark Leonard, and others for a panel on whether Europe’s institutions are actually built for the moment they keep claiming to be rising to. That conversation was rather less diplomatic. Haddad made the case for optimism, but tied it to delivery on the single market and the upcoming Multi-annual Financial Framework.

Others on the panel were less patient: the argument that Europe has spent years being passive where it needed to act and hyperactive where it needed to restrain itself landed with some force.

The question of whether Brussels can reform fast enough to matter before the moment passes did not receive a comfortable answer.

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Philippe's Le Havre problem just became a Presidential problem

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Edouard Philippe speaking in 2022 (Source: Edouard Philippe Twitter)

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The Parquet national financier confirmed that a formal judicial investigation will be opened against Édouard Philippe, his deputy, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, and the metropole’s director general, Claire-Sophie Tasias. The opening order was signed on 7 May, according to Le Monde’s reporting from yesterday.

An investigating magistrate, a juge d’instruction, now takes over a preliminary inquiry that has been running since 2023, with searches already carried out at the hôtel de ville and the metropolitan offices in April 2024.

The charges are familiar to anyone who has followed the file: misappropriation of public funds, favouritism, illegal taking of interest, concussion (the unlawful collection of sums by a public official), and moral harassment. Philippe’s office told AFP the candidate “takes note” of the procedure and will answer the magistrate’s questions “as he always has, with serenity.” His lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny, declined to comment.

What is the PNF?

The Parquet national financier was created in 2013, in the wake of the Cahuzac affair, to centralise the prosecution of high-level corruption, tax fraud and financial crime. It opens preliminary inquiries under its own authority and can request the opening of a formal judicial investigation when a complainant files a civil-party suit, or when broader investigative powers are needed.

Control of the file then transfers from the prosecutor to an independent investigating magistrate, who can conduct interrogations, place individuals under formal investigation (mise en examen), and order new investigative acts on his or her own initiative.

The Cité numérique file

The case turns on a multi-year service agreement signed on 30 July 2020. The communauté urbaine, then chaired by Philippe, contracted with the association LH French Tech for €2.154 million. The association was chaired pro bono by de Bazelaire, who also held an elected position as deputy mayor for digital affairs.

The arrangement: a public official negotiating a €2.154 million public subsidy with an association run by another elected member of her own majority. LH French Tech, created in July 2020, was the only candidate to respond to the call for expressions of interest that the metropole itself had launched four months earlier.

The whistleblower, who has used the pseudonym Judith throughout the file, was hired as deputy director general in September 2020, and by the time she started raising internal notes about LH French Tech in late 2021, €1.15 million had already been transferred.

The agreement was cut short in March 2022, the lease at the Cité numérique was terminated three months later, and the association was placed in liquidation in 2023. Her fixed-term contract was not renewed, and she filed a civil-party complaint in June 2025, which eventually led to the case being referred to an investigating magistrate.

She has since obtained whistleblower status from the Défenseur des droits, granted on 21 January 2025 after a two-year adversarial enquiry. The metropole is contesting that decision before the tribunal administratif de Paris, which her counsel describes as a textbook strategic lawsuit designed to silence her (procédure-bâillon, or SLAPP).

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EU Leaders + Canada and the UK participating in discussions on defence in 2025 (Source: Von der Leyen’s Twitter)

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We may finally be seeing the next step in the federalisation of the European Union.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have spent the last few weeks locked in negotiations behind closed doors. The conclusions are about to land in Berlin, where German finance minister Lars Klingbeil is expected to read them out, marking the latest bid by Europe’s six largest economies to deliver what twenty-seven have failed to in over a decade: a real market for European capital.

The grouping calls itself the E6, and was launched in late January by Klingbeil and his French counterpart Roland Lescure. Its four declared priorities are the Savings and Investments Union, the international role of the euro (and the digital euro), joint defence procurement, and secure supply of critical raw materials.

The Diagnosis

European households are sitting on roughly €11 trillion in cash deposits, the largest pool of idle wealth in the developed world. The money earns close to nothing and finances close to nothing. Across the wider continent, private savings stand at €33 trillion. Every year, around €300 billion of European capital walks out of the door, the bulk of it heading to Wall Street. The US stock market accounts for around 54% of global market capitalisation. Large European markets sit at 15.7%.

What the Savings and Investments Union actually is

The SIU is the rebranded successor to the Capital Markets Union, a project the Commission has been pursuing since 2015 with very little success. The idea is simple. Most European savings sit in bank accounts. Most American savings sit in financial markets. American firms can therefore raise equity cheaply, scale up, and stay home. European firms cannot, and increasingly leave. The SIU aims to harmonise rules, supervision and tax treatment so that capital flows freely between Lisbon, Warsaw and Helsinki. The Commission’s Market Integration and Supervision Package, tabled in December 2025, is the legislative spine.

The intellectual case has already been made. Twice. In April 2024, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta published Much more than a market, a report commissioned by the Council. He diagnosed the problem in detail: twenty-seven national markets, twenty-seven sets of insolvency rules, twenty-seven tax regimes, and a population that quite reasonably parks its money in the bank rather than navigate that maze.

Five months later, Mario Draghi delivered The Future of European Competitiveness. He estimated that Europe needs an additional €750-€800 billion in annual investment to keep pace with the United States and China. Without it, he wrote, the bloc faces an “existential challenge”.

The Draghi report in numbers

383 pages, around 170 recommendations. €800 billion a year in additional investment, equivalent to 4 -5 % of EU GDP. One year on, only 11.2% of recommendations have been fully implemented. Around a fifth are partially implemented. Roughly 22% have not been touched at all. Draghi himself, at a September 2025 conference, said every challenge he had identified had got worse, and once again called for common European debt to finance common European projects.

The Dark Trading Fight

The opening fight is technical and revealing. France and Spain have drafted a joint position paper, seen by POLITICO, targeting so-called ‘systematic internalisers’. These are the in-house trading platforms run by investment banks, most of them sitting in the City of London, on which firms like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs handle European equity trades without showing the prices to the wider market. Paris and Madrid want sunlight. London’s banks have grown comfortable.

Systematic internalisers, briefly

A systematic internaliser is an investment bank that matches client orders against its own books rather than sending them to a public exchange. Trades happen privately. Prices are not disclosed in real time. It is cheaper and lighter on paperwork than trading on Euronext or Deutsche Börse. It is also where a significant share of European equity trading volume now goes: the French regulator AMF has flagged that 30-40% of market share migrated to SIs after MiFID II, and ESMA’s April 2026 call for evidence found the trend has continued.

French and Spanish officials argue, in the words of their joint paper, that “the combination of fragmentation and declining transparency weakens the anchoring role traditionally played by transparent multilateral venues, ultimately eroding market efficiency and integrity”. Translation: the City is eating the continent’s lunch.

The Real Argument

The smaller capitals are nervous, and not without reason. Ireland and Portugal have warned that the E6 risks steamrolling the twenty-one other governments. Luxembourg, whose financial sector was built on regulatory arbitrage, has gone further. Its finance minister, Gilles Roth, has argued publicly that turning ESMA into a centralised supervisor would not help the EU reach its stated objectives. Those concerns are real. They are also parochial.

A continent that wants to negotiate with Washington and Beijing on equal terms cannot continue to run fifty-two separate financial supervisors. The numbers do not allow it. The geopolitics do not allow it. The Commission’s own proposal for an expanded ESMA, with an independent Executive Board overseeing the largest cross-border firms, has the European Central Bank’s full backing.

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