On April 17, the President of the Italian Council will travel to Tunisia to put the finishing touches to her migration cooperation project. The stakes are high, on the eve of the European elections after which she hopes that the far right will emerge strengthened.
She has not come to Tunis since July 2023 and the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on a strategic and global partnership between the European Union and Tunisia, of which she was the architect. But Giorgia Meloni, the President of the Italian Council, has not lost sight of Tunisia, which was her first field to experiment with a whole arsenal of anti-immigration measures of her own, ranging from the famous agreement with the EU to the Mattei, to finish with the Caivano plan. With a single objective: to put an end to illegal immigration.
Meloni, support of Ursula von der Leyen ?
After having received, on April 10 at Palazzo Chigi, Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, the day after the adoption of the Pact on Migration and Asylum, the champion of the outsourcing of immigration processing will lead to no charge for high-level meetings lasting a few hours on the occasion of her visit to Tunis on the 17th. She will then travel to Brussels to participate in the last meeting of the European Council before the European elections in June.
The challenge, for Meloni, is to ensure Tunisia’s full cooperation so as not to have any unpleasant surprises during a delicate electoral campaign. She hopes that at the end of it, the right-wing European parties will emerge victorious just like the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, whom she seems to support even if she is also visibly thinking of propelling the economist to the head of the EU. Mario Draghi, his predecessor as President of the Italian Council.
According to observers of Roman diplomacy, Meloni should increase pressure on Tunisia so that it unconditionally accepts to serve as an advanced border for Europe by carrying out, on its territory, all the formalities for controlling migrants in irregular situations, and even by applying detention measures to them.
Kaïs Saïed in embarrassment
Tunis has until now been reluctant to welcome non-Tunisian migrants in an irregular situation and expelled from the EU. On June 20, 2023, Kaïs Saïed, the Tunisian president, declared to Gérald Darmanin and Nancy Faeser, the French and German Ministers of the Interior, that “his country was not intended to be the border guard of Europe nor a land of resettlement for migrants rejected elsewhere.”
Kaïs Saïed had thus reassured his compatriots, hostile to Tunisia being the scene of situations from which Tunisian migrants themselves could suffer. He had also avoided finding himself in too blatant contradiction with his numerous declarations on respect for the sovereignty of his country.
The lack of reaction from Giorgia Meloni may have been surprising. However, it was not a question of renunciation. The Italian leader just gave time and returned to the charge by obtaining the support of Kamel Feki, the Tunisian Minister of the Interior, who often met his Italian counterpart, Matteo Piantedosi, in Rome and Tunis.
From now on, it is not only a question of providing training and equipment to ensure the watertightness of the coasts, but of erecting, as Romdhane Ben Amor, of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) explains, “a center of detention at Bir Fatnassi, in Tataouine (South).” “The project and the funds exist,” adds the human rights defender. It all depends on the Tunisian side.”
One more step, while Tunis has already been involved in “support for Search and Rescue (SAR) operations”, which most often consist of preventing departures, and forcing, even by force, boats to Turn back. Tunisia thus becomes the new Lampedusa.
Migration flows: decline in March, recovery in April
To alleviate a situation that was, to say the least, uncomfortable for Kaïs Saïed, Giorgia Meloni broadcast figures and comments on immigration before her visit. These data confirm the resumption of migratory flows since the beginning of April, after an apparent decline in March. In reality, this ebb was due more to bad weather conditions than to the measures taken by Tunisia to combat the migratory phenomenon (the latter also had the effect of reactivating departures from Libya).
According to the FTDES, during the first quarter of 2024, no less than 8,517 irregular immigrants would have been blocked before crossing the Mediterranean, and another 1,371 would have reached Italian shores in March.
The Italian authorities are particularly alarmed by the 8,000 arrivals they recorded during the first week of April, the majority of which are believed to have come from Tunisia. On the Tunisian side, we put forward the figure of 15,084 irregular migrants (including 1,599 Tunisian illegal immigrants) between January 1 and April 8, 2024. Enough, in any case, to irritate Rome.
Giorgia Meloni persists in wanting to replicate the system put in place with Tunisia in other countries. It therefore communicates extensively on the funds that Italy, and especially the EU, have paid to fight against migratory flows: nearly 60 million euros, mainly intended for training actions and the delivery of bulk or small equipment. The Memorandum also mentions the sum of 900 million euros, but its payment is conditional on an agreement from the IMF, of which everyone knows that Tunisia does not meet the conditions to obtain it. A crude way of baiting a country in serious economic difficulties.
Last point: during her trip to Tunis, the President of the Italian Council should be accompanied by Anna Maria Bernini, her Minister of Higher Education and Research. Is the goal to put in place the training aid promised at the Rome summit last January? No doubt this is a way of matching the presence of Matteo Piantedosi, his Minister of the Interior, who will probably bring less benevolent proposals to remedy the porosity of the maritime borders and the supposed lack of know-how of the Tunisians.
