Pedro Sánchez’s tone sharply contrasts with that of his European counterparts. He needs to prove it’s not just rhetoric

The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, recently read in parliament a newspaper article from Venezuela about a battered boat that had just arrived on the coast of the South American country with 106 migrants onboard. “The undocumented migrants arrested, among them 10 women and a four-year-old girl, were in terrible condition. The 19-metre boat’s hold emitted an insufferable odour,” he quoted the article as saying.

“This news story could have been published last week, and the migrants could have been Nigerian, Senegalese or Moroccan,” said Sánchez. “In reality, it appeared in a Venezuelan daily on 25 May 1949, and its protagonists were Spaniards, 106 of the 120,000 who crossed [the Atlantic] between 1945 and 1978 to escape misery and Franco’s dictatorship.”