Spain’s political row over Morocco has produced no shortage of accusations in recent days. On Monday, Carlos Cuerpo brought a different number into the conversation: €12 billion.
That is how much Spain exports to Morocco in a year. Its exports to the United States, the world’s largest economy, stand at around €16 billion.
The comparison is striking. Morocco, with a population of around 38 million, now buys Spanish goods worth only about €4 billion less than the US.
And it comes at an awkward moment.
The opposition People’s Party is pressing the government over the mass arrivals in Ceuta at the end of July, with senior figures increasingly treating Moroccan responsibility as established. The government says the evidence simply isn’t there.
So how much of Spain’s current argument over Morocco rests on what is known, and how much on politics?
Cuerpo’s answer on Monday was unequivocal on at least that point.
“We must exercise extreme caution before reaching any conclusion,” the first deputy prime minister and economy minister said on Los Desayunos, the RTVE and EFE program.
There was, he said, no “irrefutable evidence” implicating Morocco.
That does not mean the investigation should stop. Cuerpo made that distinction clear. What he rejected was moving from suspicion to conclusion before investigators had established the facts.
More than a neighbor
The €12bn figure helps explain the scale of what sits behind the political argument.
In the first six months of 2026 alone, Spain exported €6.42bn worth of goods to Morocco and imported nearly €5.8bn.
Spanish exports were up 3.5 percent from a year earlier. Imports from Morocco rose 4.1pc. Spain still came out ahead.
Nearly half of everything Spain exports to Africa now goes to Morocco.
The relationship has also moved well beyond one country selling goods to another. Cars, electrical equipment, textiles, industrial machinery and energy are tied into production chains on both sides of the Strait.
Components cross in one direction, return in another and end up in finished products. More than 350 Spanish companies operate in Morocco, while Spanish investment in the Kingdom stands at close to €2bn.
That makes the current dispute rather more complicated than the political rhetoric might suggest.
Two versions of Ceuta
On one side is the PP.
Juan Jesús Vivas said again on Monday that he was convinced Morocco was behind the events at the end of July. In Madrid, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo and several of the party’s regional presidents backed him, while Feijóo accused the government of abandoning Ceuta.
On the other is Pedro Sánchez’s government, which says it has yet to see evidence establishing Moroccan involvement.
The argument became more heated last week after excerpts attributed to a police report entered the debate.
But Police Director General Francisco Pardo subsequently told Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska that no police report attributed either the planning or execution of the events to Morocco.
Read also : Sánchez once again dismantles the anti-Morocco narrative some circles continue to cling to
That leaves an obvious problem for the PP’s case: political conviction is not the same thing as evidence.
The government, however, has a problem of its own.
Whatever the argument over who was behind the arrivals, the situation in Ceuta has put Madrid under pressure to show that it has control of what happens next.
Cuerpo said on Monday that the government had been working “from the first day” on the cases of those who entered irregularly. Residents, he acknowledged, needed to “see results."
Last week, Madrid approved €309 million to deal with the economic and social consequences of the situation, along with further investment in security and migration management.
The relationship behind the row
Cuerpo’s figures do put the political argument in perspective.
Spain is debating responsibility for one of its most sensitive recent border episodes while doing more than €12bn a year in exports with the country some of its opposition politicians are accusing.
The economic relationship is no longer peripheral enough to be treated as background noise. It runs through hundreds of companies, billions of euros in trade and investment, and production lines built across the Strait.
