> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theroundabout.eu/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Solidarity Season
- URL: https://theroundabout.eu/the-solidarity-season/
- Published: 2026-09-01T06:20:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-01T08:10:16.000Z
- Author: Aristidis Myrmidon
- Tags: Issue 1, The Commissioner's Column

*By Constantine Murmur*

The European Union's principle of solidarity, invoked at every available opportunity and enshrined, in various forms, across no fewer than four separate Treaty articles, is, Commissioner Myrmidon has long suspected, a seasonal phenomenon. It is available, broadly speaking, from November to March, during which period no member state's electorate is sufficiently agitated about migration to make solidarity politically inconvenient. In summer it hibernates. This is not, the Commissioner wishes to stress, a criticism. Hibernation is a perfectly rational response to difficult conditions. He simply notes, for the record, that when seventy-two people drowned off the coast of Ceuta on 30 July 2026, the first response of the Italian government was to suspend the Schengen agreement with a country it does not border, the first response of the Finnish interior minister was to post on X, and the first response of the European People's Party was a post on X from Manfred Weber, President of the European People's Party, blaming Spain's regularisation policy for the deaths of people who had drowned before the regularisation policy could plausibly have reached them. The Commissioner has seen this before. He had not, on this occasion, hoped to be surprised. He was not.

It is worth, at this point, reconstructing the precise sequence of events, since the sequence is instructive. On the morning of 30 July 2026, between sixty and eighty thousand people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, depending on whose figures you accept, which is itself instructive, in what Morocco's own Interior Ministry subsequently confirmed involved an organised online campaign, the precise purposes of which the Ministry declined to enumerate, though several suggested themselves. Within forty-eight hours, the greater part had already returned to Morocco. By Friday, the crisis was, in any meaningful operational sense, over. This did not prevent it from generating, over the following seventy-two hours, a suspension of Schengen by Italy, border reinforcements by France, expressions of alarm from the governments of several member states whose electorates are particularly sensitive to migration as an electoral issue, and a statement from the European Commission noting that the Schengen Borders Code contains special provisions that apply to Ceuta and Melilla. The seventy-two people who drowned were not mentioned in the statement. They were mentioned, briefly, in a subsequent statement. The Commissioner has noted the order.

The Commissioner is, by training and temperament, a man of precedent. He therefore notes that from June 2021 onward, when the government of Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus began organising flights and transport to facilitate the crossing of migrants into Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, the European Union described the operation as a hybrid attack — the Council's own formulation — invoked the language of existential threat to the European project, and by November 2021 had adopted a fifth package of sanctions specifically targeting the migration instrumentalisation, on top of four previous rounds already in place. The comparison with Ceuta is, the Commissioner acknowledges, imperfect. Belarus is not a partner. Morocco is. Morocco is, in the precise formulation of the Commission's most recent partnership document, a partner built on trust, with whom the EU enjoys a strategic and privileged relationship underpinned by shared values. The Commissioner does not propose to enumerate those shared values here, partly because the list is long and partly because Morocco's Interior Ministry has, in the days since the Ceuta operation, confirmed that it involved an organised campaign, the purposes of which the Ministry declined to enumerate, as noted above, though the Commissioner has enumerated them privately, to Madame Graticula, who found them consistent with her own assessment. The Commissioner simply observes that the difference in the EU's response to identical acts, performed by different actors, is entirely explicable once one understands that one of those actors receives over one billion euros in EU funding over the current budgetary period, a portion of which is allocated specifically to border management, and the other does not. This is not a criticism. It is an observation. The Commissioner is very careful about the distinction.

The European People's Party has since issued a further statement calling for stronger external border management, deeper cooperation with partner countries, and a renewed commitment to the European values of solidarity, dignity and the rule of law. Commissioner Myrmidon has read the statement. He has formed certain views. Madame Graticula has advised him not to share them.