Marrakech – Rabat is poised to secure increased European funding for border control and migration management in the wake of the Ceuta crisis, part of a long-delayed partnership agreement that Brussels now hopes to finalize by the end of the year, EU officials have told Euronews in an exclusive report published Thursday.
The European Union is preparing to conclude a strategic and comprehensive partnership with Morocco, modeled on the €7.4 billion package the European Commission signed with Egypt in 2024 to support its economy, manage migration, and secure regional stability.
The deal with Rabat had been years in the making. It stalled over the dispute surrounding Western Sahara and regained momentum only after a January 2026 meeting in Brussels, though that dispute remains unresolved.
What has reshaped the final text is the crisis that erupted at the end of July in the occupied enclave of Ceuta, where around 72,000 people crossed the border irregularly, and roughly 100 died. Brussels is now working to expand the migration and security dimension of the agreement.
The crisis also revived a familiar reflex in European capitals: the instinct to cast Morocco as the culprit whenever migrants reach European soil. Anonymous claims surfaced that Moroccan authorities had encouraged the crossings, accusations Rabat firmly denies. The pattern is telling. Europe’s frontier is breached, and blame drifts south – as if the pressures driving people toward Ceuta originated in Rabat rather than in Europe’s own policies.
Spanish MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a former justice minister, went further, telling Euronews that whenever the situation “gets completely out of control,” it was hard not to assume “some of Morocco’s tactics or strategic decisions are behind it all.” Such insinuations remain unproven, and they capture precisely the reductive lens Morocco has spent years rejecting.
The geography itself carries a colonial imprint. “Migration poses a very specific challenge when it comes to EU-Morocco bilateral relations, because there is only one terrestrial border with the European Union outside of Europe, and that’s between Morocco and Spain,” López Aguilar told Euronews.
That border exists for one reason: Spain still holds Ceuta and Melilla, two enclaves it has occupied on Morocco’s northern coast. Strip away those colonial vestiges, and the scene that unfolded at the end of July – thousands massing to breach a European wall on African soil – would have had no stage on which to occur.
Morocco ‘will never be anyone’s gendarme’
Rabat’s position is neither new nor ambiguous. As early as October 2018, at the Panafricaines Forum in Casablanca, Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita rejected the notion that his country should serve as Europe’s outsourced border guard, declaring that Morocco “has never been, is not, and will never be anyone’s gendarme.” He framed migration as a matter of human security rather than mere border security.
He returned to the point during the May 2021 crisis with Spain, insisting on Europe 1 that Morocco was “neither the gendarme nor the concierge of Europe” and had no obligation to police any borders but its own. On French television channel LCI that same weekend, he repeated that Morocco had no vocation to be “the gendarme of Europe, nor its concierge.”
That distinction sits at the heart of Rabat’s approach. Morocco does not patrol its coasts because Brussels or Madrid demands it, but because it has chosen to honor a partnership that, in its view, must rest on reciprocity. Reducing that relationship to border enforcement misreads both its terms and its logic.
The financial record exposes how uneven the arrangement has been. A Commission spokesperson told Euronews that the EU had committed €222 million to Morocco for migration management between 2021 and 2024 and expected to provide a further €190 million through 2027.
Set beside what Türkiye has received, the sums are not merely modest – they are dwarfed. The Commission’s own figures show roughly €1.19 billion directed specifically to migration management in Türkiye, including a €220 million border-surveillance project and a €398 million package contracted in 2025.
Morocco, by contrast, drew €234 million through the EU Trust Fund for Africa between 2015 and 2021 – 77% of it, or €179 million, for integrated border management and the fight against smuggling and trafficking – followed by a program of roughly €150 million agreed in 2022.
Broader refugee support widens the gap further: Brussels has directed close to €12.4 billion to refugees and host communities in Türkiye since 2011, a figure that spans education, healthcare, and cash assistance well beyond border control.
Von der Leyen has left little doubt about the direction Brussels prefers. In an early-August letter to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, she called Morocco an “important strategic partner,” particularly on migration, and pressed for tighter checks, physical barriers, and stronger early-warning systems, alongside improved “technical and financial support to Morocco.” Her language reflects the securitized approach that now dominates EU migration policy.
Not everyone accepts that logic. Sara Prestianni of the NGO Euromed Rights argued that the real lesson of Ceuta lies in “why so many young people are willing to risk their lives to cross the European border,” and that the EU should confront the socioeconomic and political drivers of migration rather than reinforce its frontiers. Rights groups have separately denounced the abuse and exploitation of migrants by local authorities under such arrangements.
For Rabat, the message holds steady. Morocco manages one of the most sensitive stretches of the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic routes, home to the only land border between the EU and a non-European state. It asks to be treated as a sovereign partner, not a subcontractor – and the figures suggest Europe has yet to meet it on those terms.
The Spanish government declined to say whether it was aware of the negotiations.