72,000 migrants surged into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on July 30, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez cut short the start of his weeks-long summer break to fly to the North African coastal city. The Socialist leader delivered a televised address, pushed back against criticism from other EU leaders, and then returned to his scheduled vacation at a state-owned villa on the island of Lanzarote once the emergency was deemed under control.
That sequence says plenty about how Europe’s border regime works. The people at the bottom move because they have to. The people at the top move when the optics demand it. And the machinery of state keeps running either way, with Brussels, national capitals and their spokespeople all insisting the system is “fully operational” while the crisis lands on migrants, local authorities and everyone forced to absorb the fallout.
The Border Never Goes on Holiday
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is still tracking developments and remains in constant contact with her team in Brussels and her College, according to a Commission spokesperson. The same spokesperson said she had closely followed the developments in Ceuta and was in daily contact with the three commissioners involved in directly addressing the crisis. The Commission, we’re told, stays fully operational throughout the summer, with “duty commissioners” appointed so a member of the College is available when Brussels turns into a ghost town.
That’s the language of administrative continuity, the polished varnish on a border regime that never stops sorting human beings into categories of welcome, delay, detention and exclusion. A separate Commission spokesperson put it in the usual managerial register: “What matters from a crisis-management perspective is that the responsible authorities can take decisions quickly, mobilise the necessary resources and coordinate the response.”
Quick decisions for whom, exactly? The article doesn’t need to spell it out. The answer sits in Ceuta, where 72,000 migrants arrived in a single surge and the political class immediately shifted to damage control, televised statements and blame management.
Olga Eisele, a crisis-communications researcher at the University of Amsterdam, said: “Emotions play an important role in crisis communication. People are likely insecure, anxious, maybe furious or depressed about having lost things or even people, and want these emotions to be heard by those in charge.” She added: “Physical presence can signal much more effectively that these emotions are taken seriously and are heard.”
That’s the whole performance in miniature. The state wants to be seen. It wants to be believed. It wants the public to think presence equals care, even when the underlying structure keeps producing the same violence, the same exclusions, the same emergency after emergency.
Holiday Optics, State Discipline
Sánchez drew criticism from Elías Bendodo, deputy secretary of the center-right People’s Party, who accused him of “unprecedented selfishness” for taking time off while the situation in Ceuta is “far from normal.” Bendodo added, “Sánchez insults the Spanish people by remaining on his beach vacation.” The Spanish government rejected the criticism, saying the prime minister is reachable and actively participating in remote meetings, and insisted the state remains fully operational even when its top leaders are away.
That insistence matters. It’s the modern state in one sentence: remote, reachable, always available for management, never accountable to the people who bear the consequences. The prime minister can be on a beach, the Commission can post videos on Instagram, and the apparatus still claims legitimacy because it can answer the phone.
Von der Leyen posted a video on Instagram soliciting names for two chicks hatched by her hen, Chickeletta. The image is almost too neat. A continent’s border regime hums in the background while the Commission president plays at pastoral charm online. Meanwhile, her spokesperson says she continues to follow developments across the bloc, is fully engaged, and intervenes directly whenever needed.
The article notes that officials on holiday risk looking callous or indifferent if they continue to holiday during a crisis. That’s the political problem, apparently. Not the crisis itself. Not the structures that make these crises routine. Just whether the people running them can keep their faces straight.
In 2022, North Rhine-Westphalia Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser was forced to step down after it was revealed that she had resumed a holiday break to Mallorca days after devastating floods killed over 180 people in western Germany the year before. Germany’s federal Family Minister Anne Spiegel also resigned after backlash for similarly taking a four-week holiday in France in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
The pattern is familiar. Disaster hits. Leaders disappear. Then they reappear, or don’t, depending on whether the backlash gets loud enough. The office survives. The people don’t always do so well.
The Electoral Circus Keeps Rolling
Evangelina Petridou, a crisis management expert and political science professor at Mid Sweden University, said several factors shape the intensity of backlash to a leader’s absence during a crisis, including whether the opposition weaponizes the event, whether it is a majority or minority government and whether there is an institution in place to handle the crisis that can take the heat away from the individual minister or public official. Olga Eisele said that if leaders are on holiday, it is usually also a time when not much else is happening, which in Germany is called the Sommerloch. She said that while a public official’s physical presence is preferable, reassurance can also come remotely if the public is ultimately convinced the situation is being handled competently.
That’s the trap. Competence becomes the metric. Image becomes the substitute for power. And the public is asked to judge whether the machine looks calm enough while it keeps doing what it was built to do.
The article also recalls that senior British military officials accused then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of “dereliction of duty” for heading off on a holiday in Somerset as Taliban forces moved to take Kabul in August 2021, and that his foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, faced even greater criticism for remaining on vacation in Crete until after the Afghan capital fell. French President Emmanuel Macron, although also on holiday when the Taliban took Kabul, did not face similar censure because from the Fort de Brégançon he delivered a televised address to the nation that reinforced the perception that his government was taking care of the situation and doing everything it could to bring citizens home.
Different countries, same script. The state’s legitimacy depends on performance, not justice. A televised address can soften the blow. A holiday can become “dereliction of duty.” The border, the war machine, the emergency apparatus — all of it keeps moving beneath the theatre.
Fear of backlash leads many leaders to cancel holidays amid crisis situations. Keir Starmer called off a family vacation in August 2024 as far-right riots spread across England, and Portugal’s Prime Minister Luís Montenegro declined to take time off as wildfires tore across the country last year.
A July 2025 Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of Britons thought it was important that the prime minister take a holiday, while 44 percent believed the head of government should take about as much time off as the average worker. More than three-quarters — 78 percent — said it was important that the prime minister be easily contactable while away.
Europeans are entitled to more paid annual leave than workers in any other part of the world, according to International Labor Organization data, and Eurofound’s annual European Working Conditions Survey shows the bloc’s citizens strongly value work-life balance. The contradiction writes itself. Workers are told to value balance. Leaders are judged on whether they can vanish without looking too obvious. The border regime, the crisis machine and the political class all keep their distance from the people who actually live with the consequences.