Tunisia’s Saied shakes the EU, and the Commission seem fine with it Saied shakes the EU, and the Commission is totally fine with it Tunisian President Kais Saied has sent back to the European Commission a payment of €60 million from a previously agreed deal linked to the Tunisian post-pandemic recovery. Tensions rose on 2 October, when Saied declared the country would not accept the already agreed EU funds, which he dismissed as “for charity”. The EU’s Enlargement and Neighbourhood Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi publicly replied that Tunisia is free to “wire back” the €60 million just transferred. And he did. It is another step towards a hot autumn when it comes to relations between Tunisia and the EU, where the European Commission is not able to lead the negotiations and is playing second fiddle to Tunisia. Let’s see why. “There is no alternative to ‘Team Europe’ approach,” the European Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas pointed out on Tuesday (10 October) at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) migration conference in Vienna. He referred to the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte. The EU-Tunisia MoU, signed in July, aims to contain people departing from Tunisia in exchange for EU money for different projects on the ground (some related to migration, others not). The deal has since July manifested several problems of transparency and clarity in the procedures. First, member states have been complaining in the Council since July about the memorandum because, despite broadly agreeing on its content, they did not get to read the final text and there has been a lack of due diligence in the procedures. The ‘Team Europe’, apparently composed of the Commission, and the Dutch and Italian premiers, who signed the agreement, was challenged by many top EU politicians, including the leading members of the European Parliament. The most common argument is that it is not clear who legitimised those leaders to be there and represent the whole Union for the deal. In the meantime, migrants continue arriving on unsafe boats from Tunisia, occupying the front pages of EU media, particularly Italy’s island of Lampedusa, a hotspot for newly arrived migrants. Saied can sit back and enjoy his leverage over the EU. The Commission can only say that business as usual continues despite, obviously, many things going wrong. In the meantime, the Commission wants to conclude similar deals with other African countries, such as Egypt, and Schinas is travelling to West Africa to meet local authorities and discuss, among other things, migration. Many governments, as well as the Commission, realise they cannot avoid dealing with third countries and want to be pragmatic. The trouble is, the EU is also supposed to have values and stand up for human rights when dealing with these situations. Still, the Commission is going on as if nothing was happening. What will it take for the EU to understand that the Tunisian pattern, as others have done in the past, can only bring about a great disadvantage to the Union? | 
