Migrants and strongmen: the EU’s north Africa headache

Welcome back. If it’s Sunday, it must be Egypt. In the EU’s latest effort to curb irregular migration from north Africa, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will be in Cairo tomorrow with three prime ministers in tow (from Belgium, Greece and Italy) and the promise of a multibillion-euro aid package. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Mediterranean disunion

Ostensibly, the Egypt initiative, and similar plans for Tunisia and Mauritania, serve the wider purpose of promoting political and economic stability in a region for which the EU has struggled to devise a convincing policy framework for at least 30 years.

How many readers remember the Barcelona Process, which kicked off in 1995? Or the Union for the Mediterranean, launched in 2008?

The EU’s newest plans place another layer of policies upon what is already a complicated array of north Africa initiatives, set up either by the 27-nation bloc itself or by member states such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

European parliament legislators who have expertise in north African issues expressed concern this week about the commission’s eagerness to allocate billions of euros to the region. Mounir Satouri, a French MEP, said:

It seems that we are bankrolling dictators across the region. And that is not the Europe that we want to see. That is not the place which the EU should be holding in the world.

Migration politics

Any assessment of the EU’s north Africa policies must start with the recognition that vexed questions of migration, legal and illegal, are at their heart.

These controversies are reshaping national political landscapes across Europe, by driving up support for hard-right parties and by prompting traditional centre-right parties to borrow some of the hard right’s rhetoric and policies. Elections to the European parliament that will be held on June 6-9 are expected to reinforce these trends.

Hard-right and conservative nationalist parties are generally scornful of the EU. Nonetheless, some of their leaders aim to “conquer it” from within, as Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán said last year.

For mainstream European politicians, getting a grip on irregular migration is therefore a priority for two reasons: to stabilise domestic politics in their own countries, and to prevent hard-right electoral gains that might disrupt or even paralyse broader EU policymaking.

From ‘wir schaffen das’ to ‘wir schaffen das nicht’

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel uttered the most memorable words on the subject of migration. Speaking in August 2015 as hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, mainly from conflict-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, she said: “Wir schaffen das” (“we can manage this”).

Germany did indeed lead the way in coping with that crisis. But the lesson that virtually all European leaders drew from it was — never again.

How far have they achieved that goal? According to Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, there were some 380,000 irregular crossings into Europe last year, the highest number since 2016. In the first two months of this year, there were 31,200 irregular crossings, about the same as in the equivalent period of 2023.

However, a European Commission document puts matters in perspective:

While irregular migration is often in the spotlight, the reality is that irregular entries account for a small fraction of migration into the EU.

The commission estimates that 2.25mn people immigrated to the EU in 2021, and 1.12mn emigrated, putting net immigration at about 1.14mn. The figures for legal immigration are significantly higher than the roughly 200,000 illegal arrivals estimated by Frontex for 2021.

Europe wants legal migrants

Much legal immigration is stimulated by labour shortages in EU economies and by government programmes aimed at attracting overseas workers, as I set out in a newsletter in July.

Naturally, none of this diminishes the political sensitivity of irregular migration. On one hand, it is embarrassing for the EU that the Mediterranean continued last year to be the world’s deadliest route for migrants, with at least 3,129 deaths and disappearances out of a worldwide total of at least 8,565, according to the International Organization for Migration.

On the other hand, irregular arrivals remain at levels high enough to generate polemics over whether the EU’s efforts to secure its borders, clamp down on people-trafficking and tackle the root causes of migration pressures are making any difference.

Migration trends in Africa

The factors driving African migration range from population growth and poverty to conflicts that, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, have displaced more than 40mn people.

Then there is climate change, which the ACSS forecasts will account for up to 10 per cent of all African cross-border migration by mid-century. In the chart below, provided by the ACSS, we see that natural disasters triggered a sharp rise in the displacement of Africans in 2022.

Cross-border migration occurs primarily within Africa, including below the Sahara. But if we look again at Frontex’s latest data, we see that the main African nationalities accounting for irregular entries into Europe include Algerians, Egyptians, Mauritanians, Moroccans and Tunisians.

In other words, while sub-Saharan migration through north Africa into Europe is an issue, north African irregular migration is a challenge for the EU in its own right. This explains the EU’s recent financial assistance schemes for Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritania.

Death of Arab Spring idealism

EU policies towards north Africa have changed a lot — some would say, zigzagged — over the past 15 years. Up to 2010, European leaders chose not to rock the boat with regional dictators and strongmen such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Anthony Dworkin, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, picks up the story:

Following the 2011 pro-democratic uprisings across the Arab world, the EU and its member states coalesced around a policy of backing reform and supporting transitions.

But after 2015, a surge in migration and rising concern about terrorism — both issues that played strongly in European domestic politics — led to a more transactional approach.

More recently, the war in Ukraine and the need to fight climate change have prompted Europeans to focus on both gas supplies and renewable energy.

Misreading Tunisia

Tunisia has become a particular headache for the EU. Once considered the Arab Spring’s brightest democratic hope, it has turned into an awkward partner for the EU, as the International Crisis Group explains:

Since July 2021, when President Kais Saied concentrated power in his own hands, Tunisia has taken an autocratic turn amid a growing economic crisis. Saied has accompanied his efforts to build an authoritarian system with stridently nationalist rhetoric that has sparked vigilante attacks on sub-Saharan migrants.

By making migration controls the centrepiece of its Tunisia policy, and by offering money to the regime despite mixed results, the EU has found itself working with Saied much as it used to co-operate with the pre-Arab Spring dictatorship.

The general goal is stability in Tunisia, but Judy Dempsey, the editor of Carnegie Europe’s Strategic Europe blog, contends:

That kind of stability breeds its own instability. That was one of the main features of the Arab Spring.

Who likes Italy’s Mattei plan?

Not all Europe’s African policies come out of Brussels. A case in point is Italy’s Mattei plan, named after Enrico Mattei, an industrialist and public administrator who dominated Italian energy policy in the 1950s.

Some 25 African heads of state and government turned up in Rome in January for the launch of the plan, the flagship foreign policy initiative of Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government. She described it as a “peer-to-peer plan for Africa”, involving political, diplomatic and economic co-operation and backed by €5.5bn in credits, grants and guarantees.

However, some African leaders were not convinced. At the Rome summit, Moussa Faki, a former Chadian premier who now represents the African Union, gave a speech in which he pointedly described the Mattei plan as something “about which we would have liked to have been consulted”.

In a commentary for the Istituto Affari Internazionali, Filippo Simonelli, Maria Luisa Fantappié and Leo Goretti caution that the Mattei plan could bring short-term progress on curbing irregular migration, but it appears to rely too much on personal contacts and deals between European and African leaders:

Inasmuch as they sustain a patrimonial personality-centred system, accelerate the crisis of representation at the expense of civil society and amplify intra-elite competitions conducive to military coups, such deals and relations may well be a good recipe for instability in the long run.

It is a perceptive observation. In their desperation to curb irregular migration, EU leaders are using methods of diplomacy and financial inducement that risk undermining their own objective.

More on this topic

Technological push and pull factors of bilateral migration — an analysis by Mahdi Ghodsi, Michael Landesmann and Antea Barišić for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies

Tony’s picks of the week

• The rise of the messaging platform Telegram raises the question of whether it is the latest social media giant or, more ominously, the new “dark web”, the FT’s Hannah Murphy reports from Dubai

• Russia’s attempts to dominate the Black Sea are backfiring by encouraging the region’s gradual integration into the west’s political and security ecosystem, Galip Dalay and Natalie Sabanadze write for Chatham House, the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs