The ongoing migration crisis did not create Spanish hostility toward Morocco. It merely lifted the lid off something that had been building for years. For months, the noise has been growing across Spain’s political spectrum, spilling even into football. In Spain, the ideological distinctions between the left, center, and right seem to disappear when it comes to Morocco.
The migration controversy may have been the spark of the current anti-Moroccan campaign, but it does not by itself explain the scale of the popular, politically manufactured hostility to Rabat.
Behind the insults, accusations, media campaigns and political one-upmanship, a deeper reality is emerging: Spain is uneasily discovering that its southern neighbor is no longer the country it once learned to look down on. It is no longer the Morocco of Spain’s paternalistic and supremacist imagination. As a result, Madrid’s problem with Rabat is no longer merely territorial, migratory or diplomatic. It has become economic, strategic, and psychological.
Growing Moroccan assertiveness
Until a few years ago, the relationship was straightforward in the Spanish imagination. Spain perceive itself as the superior European, industrial and technological power. And it saw Morocco as the southern neighbor destined to remain a source of labor, a supplier of agricultural goods, a country dependent on Europe. But that framework is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
One need only look at the maritime map to register the changing dynamics. Tanger Med is no longer a distant Moroccan promise; it is a reality that has increasingly been forcing Spain to reconsider the balance of its own ports. Tanger Med closed 2025 with roughly 11 million containers handled, securing its place as the 17th-largest container port in the world and the leading port in Africa and the Mediterranean. It is now ranked alongside hubs like Hamburg and Antwerp, with its figures comfortably dwarfing Algeciras’s throughput across the strait.
And now there is Nador West Med, Morocco’s third deepwater port, set to open in late 2026 alongside the Dakhla Atlantique project slated for 2028. This is not simply another piece of infrastructure; it is part of a broader Moroccan strategy of turning ports into integrated platforms combining logistics, industry, energy, investment and manufacturing.
Spanish analysts are beginning to speak openly of a Moroccan strategy that is altering the balance in the Strait and placing growing pressure on ports on the northern shore. That is the real change. Rather than merely seeking to export to Europe, Morocco now wants a stake in controlling logistics chains, attracting industry, capturing investment and becoming a platform in its own right between Europe, Africa, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In other words, the North African kingdom is no longer asking for a place in the system; it is building a system of its own.
Tanger Med was only the beginning
Tanger Med has already transformed the economic geography of the Strait, and there is no longer any ambiguity about Morocco’s resurgence as a formidable competitor and a serious regional player with a long-term vision. Indeed, Tanger Med’s competition with Algeciras has moved from theoretical to structural.
In a matter of months, Nador West Med will add another piece to this expanding puzzle, giving Morocco a second major maritime competitiveness hub in the western Mediterranean. Then comes the Atlantic coast, with Dakhla Atlantique, which will eventually extend the Kingdom’s maritime reach toward West Africa and the Atlantic.
This is where the issue becomes strategically vertiginous for Spain. The matter is no longer limited to Algeciras. It increasingly concerns Valencia, the Canary Islands and Spain’s broader position along the maritime routes linking Europe, Africa and the Atlantic. Morocco is building an economic geography that no longer necessarily runs through Spanish infrastructure. And when a neighbor ceases to be a mere spectator and becomes a hub in its own right, the relationship — and the psychology surrounding it — changes.
Spain liked Morocco when it could not compete
There is a deep contradiction here. Spain likes Morocco when it is a junior partner, a customer, a supplier, a tourist destination, a cooperative neighbor or an actor tasked with containing migration flows. It is far less comfortable with the North African kingdom as a powerful enough regional player or peer with the means and willingness to negotiate with Spain as an equal. That changing dynamic sits at the heart of the current, ambivalent relationship between the two neighbors.
Part of Spain understands that opposing this dynamic would be counterproductive. And this realization is reflected in Pedro Sánchez’s decision to favor a strategic partnership with Rabat over permanent confrontation. This newfound relationship is built on the April 2022 joint declaration and anchored, as Rabat’s foreign ministry has repeatedly stressed, in mutual respect and dialogue rather than unilateral moves. There may even be room for a genuinely win-win relationship based on complementarity.
Yet many in Spain see things differently: if Morocco is rising too quickly, the consequences of that rise should at least be contained. This is where migration becomes politically useful. The Ceuta crisis supplied the perfect narrative, turning Morocco into a domestic political issue and a convenient scapegoat for internal score-settling.
As one Moroccan analyst has warned, the intensity of this viral, conspiracy-driven “Morocco-bashing” campaign in parts of Spain’s political, intellectual and media circles risks reviving the tensions of the pre-2022 period. It has allowed a complex structural question — the evolving balance of power — to be flattened into a simpler story of Morocco supposedly becoming aggressive, unpredictable, manipulative, even threatening. The problem is that this reading lets Spain avoid the fundamental question: why has Morocco become so much harder to contain than it was twenty or thirty years ago — and does it have the right to be?
When history comes back through the window
When an emerging power becomes inconvenient, history often returns to the foreground. Between Spain and Morocco, there is no shortage of material — the medieval relations between the two shores, the conquest of al-Andalus, the Reconquista, and the Spanish historical memory built around those events, subsequently reshaped through a self-serving and often misleading narrative.
This does not mean contemporary Spain lives with a conscious obsession with Tariq ibn Ziyad. It is subtler than that. Old images can outlive the generations that created them, resurfacing when the balance of power shifts.
While a weak Morocco could be dismissed as a troublesome neighbor, a powerful Morocco awakens a different memory of a southern Mediterranean space that, for centuries, was home to a political, military and cultural power capable of exerting direct influence on the Iberian Peninsula. This may be one reason contemporary Morocco unsettles some Spaniards more than it rationally should: the “little” North African kingdom no longer fits the mental image they once had of it.
And then there is Washington
Another element deserves close attention in this changing bilateral dynamic: the strategic relationship between Rabat and Washington. Here too, historical shortcuts should be avoided. The United States did withdraw its main air bases from Morocco in the early 1960s. Official American documents show the withdrawal from Sidi Slimane and Nouasseur was part of agreements reached with the kingdom, which viewed it as completing its independence; the process was largely finished by December 1963.
Morocco could hardly ask the French to leave while continuing to allow the Americans to remain on its soil. It would nonetheless be excessive to claim these bases were simply “transferred to Jerez,” the history of the American military presence in Spain being far more complicated than that. But the broader strategic point stands: the American presence helped Spain achieve the development it enjoys today, alongside its accession to the European Union. Spain built part of its military centrality in the western Mediterranean within an environment where the American presence was a major component of its strategic weight.
The point is that Morocco has now itself become a privileged military partner of Washington. This year’s African Lion Exercise offers a striking illustration: more than 5,000 troops from roughly 40 participating and observer countries took part, in an exercise that notably involved American B-52 bombers and Moroccan F-16 fighter jets flying joint formations over Cap Draa.
Rabat’s partnership with Washington is no longer symbolic. Morocco has become a security actor recognized by the United States across the African and Mediterranean spheres — and that changes how Spain sees it. Madrid is not merely looking at a neighbor undergoing economic development. It is looking at a neighbor simultaneously becoming a maritime hub, an industrial platform, a regional military power, and a strategic partner of Washington.
The real Spanish vertigo
And this is probably the heart of the matter.
Because, what ultimately unsettles part of Spain is not a poor, dependent Morocco, or one constantly asking for something.
It is an autonomous Morocco that builds its infrastructure largely through Moroccan companies, attracts multinationals, develops its ports, invests beyond its borders, becomes an industrial export platform, invests strategically in its armed forces, and expands its relations with the United States, China, India, the Gulf monarchies and Africa.
It is a Morocco turning itself into a logistical power connecting several continents. Above all, it is a Morocco that no longer systematically asks Europe for permission to define its own priorities. That is the Morocco disrupting old Spanish certainties.
The ‘Morocco-bashing’ trap
The migration crisis was therefore less a cause than a revelation. It brought economic, strategic, territorial and historical frustrations to the surface all at once. On the left, in the center and on the right, each side has its own reasons for criticizing Rabat.
But the cumulative effect is a new impression of Morocco having become a convenient outlet for Spain’s anxieties, even as analysts on both sides caution that close cooperation with Rabat remains, in the words of one Maghreb specialist, “imperative, almost unavoidable, for any government in Spain.”
The paradox is that this strategy may prove counterproductive. The more Spain appears determined to hold Morocco back, the more it turns Morocco’s success into a question of power. Morocco has perhaps never been discussed so much, except during World Cups; the kingdom has never been so visible on such a broad scale. The more Spain treats every Moroccan port as a threat, the more it implicitly acknowledges their importance. The more it dramatizes every Moroccan advance, the more it confirms that the balance of power is shifting. That is where the real paradox lies.
Morocco is no longer asking Spain to recognize its power. It is building the infrastructure that makes that power visible. Tanger Med announced it. Nador West Med will amplify it. Dakhla will extend it toward the Atlantic and Africa. African Lion underscores its strategic dimension. And Washington, for its part, confirms without disguise that Rabat is no longer merely a regional partner, that it has become a strategic interlocutor.
So, behind the migration noise, the controversies and the “Morocco bashing,” a much more uncomfortable question is taking shape in Madrid. Namely, that the real problem may not be a Morocco that is changing, but a Spain that no longer knows how to look at a neighbor growing more powerful by the day.
