Introduction

In April 2024, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Tunisian President Kais Saied for the fourth time in a year. The visit was presented as a success: the two leaders vowed to deepen cooperation, notably over migration, based on the principle of mutual benefit (Gasteli & Kaval, 2024). This successful outcome followed a tumultuous negotiation period with the European Union over a joint approach to migration governance, as some European Union members drew attention to Tunisia’s human rights record, and Saied reiterated his refusal to act as Europe’s border patrol (Dahmani, 2024).

A closer examination of Italy’s role in facilitating EU-Tunisian cooperation over migration helps unpack how populists use foreign policy to preserve sovereignty and mount a symbolic defense of an embattled national identity. It is a truism that populists tend to pursue foreign policy programs that strengthen national sovereignty at the expense of greater long-term international cooperation. This pattern is particularly pronounced when authoritarian populists are driven by strong ethnonationalist concerns, resulting in a reticence to adopt policy positions that might benefit other nations or minority groups (Wajner et al., 2024: 1825). Many such ethnonationalist populist actors can be identified as civilizational populists (Morieson, 2023), a phenomenon referring to populists around the world who adopt a culturalized understanding of the ‘people’ as belonging to a civilizational heritage (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2022b). Such rhetoric allows for boundaries to be drawn between insiders and outsiders that imply a concern with race and demography while instead using the language of culture and civilizational continuity (Mandelc, 2025). This both draws on nationalist tropes while also transcending them through reference to a more grandiose imaginary (Brubaker, 2017: 1211).

For such actors, migration forms a particularly potent issue. Not only is it is seen to threaten the ‘purity’ of the nation or region’s people, but it also is typically associated with the priorities of elites and their neoliberal economic project (Stewart, 2020: 1210). Indeed, civilizational populists’ construction of the ‘elite’ presents them as “culturally deracinated” and antagonistic to cultural and national specificity, in Brubaker’s framing (Brubaker, 2017: 1192). Migration thus combines populism’s tendency to differentiate itself from both global elites and their ideology of cosmopolitanism, as well as the “dangerous” foreigners who are often linked to crime and disorder (Taguieff, 1997: 20). Meloni herself has referred to migration as part of a “globalist” project to render Italy more economically and culturally vulnerable by depriving its citizenry of their natural identities (Kington, 2022). Yet civilizational populism – and its connections to race, religion, and ethnicity – also helps illuminate the logic of why some migrants may be more accepted than others. For example, while the Meloni regime has been critical of policies allowing for the intake of Middle Eastern and African migrants and refugees, it has been more welcoming towards Ukrainians fleeing the conflict.

In Tunisia, the issue of migration has been particularly salient under the Saied regime. Tunisia has long been a country of departure for migrants seeking to reach Europe, a pattern which accelerated after the economic and political instability following the Arab Spring. Yet while in the past, most migrants transiting from Tunisia to Europe have been of Tunisian origin, since 2023 Tunisia has become the largest point of departure for sub-Saharan African migrants embarking for Europe (Abderrahim, 2024). This has introduced new dynamics, including growing racist and anti-sub-Saharan African sentiments, that have been intensified by European policy favoring the externalization of migration governance.

In referencing migration, Saied has used language typical of civilizational populism: he has presented mass sub-Saharan African migration as a demographic threat to Tunisian identity. Such rhetoric was civilizational rather than solely ethnonationalist: irregular migration, in his words, would transform Tunisia from a member of the Arab-Islamic community to “just another African country” (Al Jazeera, 2023). This statement drew on a long history of contestation within negotiations over Tunisia’s regional identity, as well as long-standing marginalization of the country’s Black population (Mzioudet, 2024). After Saied voiced these sentiments in an infamous and controversial speech, Tunisian police began escalating repression of migrants and punishing organizations that advocate on their behalf.

Yet in addressing this issue, the Saied regime has had to balance competing priorities, indicating the complex and shifting power dynamics constraining populists’ agency in the foreign policy arena. The EU has been willing to offer much-needed financial support in exchange for Tunisian cooperation over migration governance. This dependency makes it difficult for Saied to adopt a classic civilizational populist positioning, in which sovereignty is performed through pure oppositionality (Dudlak, 2025: 629). In effect, however, more interceptions of migrant crossings at sea have led to increasing numbers of sub-Saharan Africans stranded in Tunisia, unable to work or obtain housing due to stricter government policies and further inflaming tensions with Tunisian citizens.

This article analyses the tensions at work in EU-Tunisian migration negotiations and their resolution through Italian mediation. Through analyzing official statements, politicians’ interviews with the press, media coverage, and debates within the European Union from the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in 2023 to the development of European-Tunisian migration partnership throughout 2024-2025, it traces the narratives advanced by proponents and antagonists of the MoU about migration within Tunisia, Italy, and the European Union. This allows for populism to be analyzed as both a strategy and ideology, builds on studies that similarly approach populism – and its links to securitized imaginaries – using a qualitative narrative analytical method centering intertextuality (Löfflmann, 2024).

This study offers theoretical insights linking populist foreign policy to ontological security. Ontological security suggests that states – as well as international bodies – strive for continuity of identity, even at the cost of instability in their foreign relations (Mitzen, 2006). Through analyzing the EU-Italy-Tunisia relationship, this article argues that Meloni’s intercession, fueled in part by shared civilizational populist values between Meloni and Saied, helped the Saied regime cooperate with Europe whilst avoiding the appearance of subservience to the European Union. In so doing, it preserved both the ontological security of the Saied regime and its prioritization of sovereignty, as well as that of the European Union, who could distance themselves from the human rights abuses attending the deal.

This article suggests that unequal power dynamics between the European Union and Tunisia – and between member states within the European Union – are essential in understanding the Saied regime’s seeming erraticism during migration negotiations. Consequently, it advances that bilateral relations between populists can be improved through symbolically differentiating themselves from multilateral institutions – which, in turn, can further empower populists on the global stage.

Mapping Populist Engagement with International Institutions

Many studies on populist foreign policy suggest that populists’ approach to international issues follows from their anti-elitist, pro-‘people’ domestic policy priorities. Much of this aligns with the understanding of populism as a thin ideology: if populism is defined, as Mudde (2004) suggests, by a belief in the majoritarian sovereignty of the ‘people’ against a corrupt elite class, populist foreign policy should largely comply with domestic rhetoric. In this understanding, antagonism towards domestic elites flows into an analogous hostility towards perceived transnational elites.

While populist foreign policy frequently aligns with that of more mainstream actors, it can be distinguished by its antagonistic and sovereigntist dimensions that politicize or polarize foreign policy through employing victimization narratives (Destradi et al., 2022). Civilizational populists often mount a rhetorical defense of national sovereignty through strengthening state power (Dudlak, 2025: 628) and react strongly against the imposition of norms inculcated by the liberal order (Bettiza et al., 2023), against which they position themselves as opponents of internationalist homogenization (Stewart, 2002). On a cultural level, they thus reject ‘foreign’ cultural developments, particularly surrounding gender and the family (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022). In the Global South, many populists combine such rhetoric with anti-Western narratives drawing on genuine power imbalances that reinforce a sense of crisis (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2022b). For civilizational populists, institutions associated with this ‘globalist’ consensus, representing the rule of ‘experts’ to the perceived exclusion of the popular will and the erosion of national sovereignty, are particularly scorned (Pacciardi et al., 2024). While NGOs, international financial institutions and the United Nations are popular targets, the European Union forms one of the emblematic examples uniting right-wing and left-wing European populists when it imposes unpopular measures believed to threaten national sovereignty (Rathgeb & Hopkin, 2023).

However, charting populist foreign policy is also problematic due to the gap between populist rhetoric and behavior. This is especially salient with regards to international institutions. While the populist tendency to valorize sovereignty may spur distaste towards international institutions, it usually does not entail isolationism or a complete rejection of multilateralism (Humble, 2023). In fact, many populist leaders prefer to reshape or disrupt international organizations rather than exit them altogether (Lehoczki, 2023; Pacciardi et al., 2024; Van Kessel, 2024). This can be explained through understanding the relative capacity of the populist-led state within the international system and the structural constraints this order imposes. As Chryssogelos observes, “experiments in populist reorientation of foreign policy are quickly reined in by the realities of the international system” (Chryssogelos, 2021: 15). Realistically, full disengagement leading to complete isolation is impractical and undesirable. Giurlando and Monteleone (2024) find that populists in southern Europe were highly critical of the EU following the imposition of austerity measures after the financial crisis and presented themselves as underdogs battling for state sovereignty. However, this rhetoric largely dissipated after their nation-states gained access to the Next Generation EU economic recovery funds in 2020. Geopolitical constraints, therefore, can profoundly affect populist ideologies and strategies.

Bilateral Populist Cooperation

Populists balance their natural inclination towards defense of national sovereignty – often exemplified by symbolic or material disengagement from multilateral institutions – and practical realities. Developing alliances with like-minded states is one strategy that can help defuse this tension. As civilizational populism is premised on a fundamental opposition to the liberal order and the institutions perceived to embody it (Bettiza et al., 2023), resistance to such institutions can form the basis for alignments between populist leaders (Lehoczki, 2023). Civilizational populism – which often reduces civilizational complexities to an anti-cosmopolitan traditionalism – may even be particularly predisposed to this tendency. Indeed, defense of conservative Christian identity has acted as the ‘glue’ for the development of transnational organizations like the Conservative Political Action Conference (Mos & Piovezan, 2024).

Yilmaz and Morieson (2023) also find that different kinds of civilizational populism can also foster cooperation, as the Erdoğan-Orbán friendship demonstrates. Despite Erdoğan’s hostility to the ‘West’ and his public criticism of European Islamophobia and Orbán’s civilizational defense of Europe’s purported Christian identity, the two leaders are reportedly close and have escalated cooperation in issues ranging from trade to defense. Yilmaz and Morieson suggest that this is a pragmatic alliance, but it also raises the question of who the most dangerous ‘Other’ in civilizational populist ideology is. Soborski, Garapich, and Jochymek observe that perceived commonalities or shared values between exclusionary populists from different regions can facilitate a sense of affinity (Soborski et al., 2025: 7). Similarly, Thorliefsson (2021) observes that the European Union – and key figureheads within it – are often invoked as a tropified antagonist representing an existential ‘globalist’ threat to specific nations’ senses of cultural heritage across cases. If civilizational populism sacralizes the identification of specific regions with religions and ethnicities, there is nothing precluding cooperation between civilizational populist leaders representing different identity groups. In fact, it may even be incentivized when resisting the perceived imposition of cosmopolitan, ‘globalist’ agendas.

On the surface, Tunisian-Italian cooperation can be read through this bilateral, positive-sum lens. Yet this article finds that while the construction of the EU as an ‘Other’ was essential to facilitating this cooperation, the material result largely conformed with the EU’s policy preferences. Consequently, this article problematizes the straightforward separation between populism and the liberal order. I argue that the preference for bilateral populist alliances over cooperation with multilateral institutions should be read as a predominantly performative and symbolic, rather than material, choice allowing for both the civilizational populist actors and the international organization to achieve their desired aims.

The findings of this article also shed light on how civilizational populists like Saied legitimize unpopular foreign policy decisions surrounding migration in a context of North-South inequality. When geopolitical considerations introduce structural constraints incentivizing cooperation with international organizations, civilizational populists are reticent to appear subservient to external powers, even while they can ill afford to reject the deals offered. The Tunisia-Italy-EU case suggests that negotiations with other civilizational populists representing these institutions can help all parties maintain ontological security in the face of constrained decision-making.

Migration Governance and Ontological Security between Europe and North Africa

Recent Europe-North African agreements have centered migration – a flashpoint issue for civilizational populists. Following the so-called “migrant crisis” of 2015-2016, populist actors benefited. Meloni herself rose to prominence on a heavy anti-immigration platform, raising civilizational populist fears about the potential erosion of Italian identity and culture through linking it to a classical Christian and Greco-Roman heritage (Albanese, 2025). She has also been critical of European Union initiatives for allegedly undermining the continent’s Christian belonging (Albanese, 2025). After becoming Prime Minister in 2022, she made headlines for harsh migration policies. These included more stringent conditions for rescue vessels, controversial examinations aimed to detect migrants making fraudulent decrees about their age, and externalization agreements with countries like Libya and Albania (Dumont, 2024).

Yet a securitized approach to migration is not the sole province of populists; it has become part of the larger European political zeitgeist post-2015. Meloni’s approach to migration has been strongly praised by many non-populist figures within the EU (Dumont, 2024). Indeed, externalization has become a significant driver of EU migration policy. In 2016, the EU concluded a prototypical externalization agreement providing Turkey with billions of euros in funding for refugee support in exchange for Turkey’s escalation of measures to slow irregular migration to EU member states. The deal with Tunisia in 2023 represented an extension of this policy. Irregular migration from Tunisia to Europe had been rising since the revolution in 2011. Yet the securitization of the Libya coast following the deal with Italy, coupled with Tunisia’s visa-free policy with some sub-Saharan African countries, rendered it a transit country for many sub-Saharan African migrants seeking to reach Europe, mostly through the Sfax-to-Lampedusa route. By 2023, Tunisia’s Ministry of the Interior claimed that of the 70,000 migrants apprehended, 77.5% were of sub-Saharan origin (Meddeb & Louati, 2024: 8).

The conclusion of a deal proffering European cash for Tunisian migration governance appeared to benefit both actors. Tunisia’s economy, shaky since the Arab Uprisings, had been wracked by the Covid-19 crisis, as economic growth had stalled, and unemployment and the cost of necessities increased. As the government was reluctant to scale back social spending, debt mounted, troubling the country’s creditors (Diwan et al., 2024). EU funding provided a much-needed injection of cash into a regime struggling to sustain popularity after a 2021 coup that had promised greater political and economic efficacy. It also offered vital international legitimation for Saied (Meddeb & Louati, 2024: 17).

Yet despite its potential benefits, the practical implications of the deal were ideologically problematic to the Saied government’s civilizational populist ethos. Turkey’s absorption of millions of refugees rendered it the largest refugee-hosting country in the world; consequently, it used the threat of relaxing border control as a bargaining chip in its migration diplomacy (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2019: 117). As Freier, Micinski and Tsourapas (2021) demonstrate, refugee rent-seeking – or absorbing refugees to gain a geopolitical advantage in migration negotiations – can be advantageous. For Saied, however, resettlement of sub-Saharan Africans within Tunisia was unacceptable; he presented as a conspiratorial plot to destabilize the country. The notion of a conspiracy was echoed by many of his ministers; Minister of the Interior Taoufik Charfeddine, for example, suggested that there was an “unprecedented” campaign against the nation (Le Temps, 2023b). Notions of a foreign conspiracy to resettle migrants in Tunisia are periodically invoked, with severe consequences for the treatments of migrants within the country (Middle East Monitor, 2025). Yet, as many of Saied’s critics point out, the EU deal effectively traps the sub-Saharan African population within Tunisia, given that no cash support would be provided for policing Tunisia’s desert borders (Nawaat, 2023). This poses a dilemma between civilizational populist ideology – and its associated construction of ontological security – and material incentives and necessities.

Civilizational populism is deeply linked to ontological security. Populist narratives premised on the defense of an imagined ethnic ‘heartland’ offer a response to ontological insecurities about stability, holism and belonging (Kinnvall, 2019). Bettiza, Bolton and Lewis suggest that civilizationism can be understood as a response to these anxieties through positing “an essentially distinct and (seemingly) temporally continuous collective identity” (Bettiza et al., 2023: 5). Civilizational populism situates these tendencies within an anti-elite frame. Migration thus becomes a threat to both the physical territory and symbolic purity of the ‘people’ (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2022a), deployed in a racialized and securitized exclusionary discourse of invasion and contamination mapped onto economic grievances (Thorliefsson, 2021). In the Global South, this is often coupled with fears of covert foreign intervention – often shared between populists and non-populists – that might accelerate existing extractive asymmetries or threaten territorial or symbolic sovereignty, leading to a backlash against the perceived global ‘elite’ (Destradi & Plagemann, 2019). In the case of sub-Saharan African migration to Tunisia, both of these tendencies are at work. For Kais Saied, a civilizational populist who has repeatedly emphasized the significance of sovereignty, a cash-for-migration governance deal that would lead to the de facto residence of many sub-Saharan Africans within Tunisia through blocking their transit to Europe would have been difficult to justify, despite its economic benefits.

Yet as Mitzen (2018) observes, migration also poses a more complex, conflicting ontological anxiety for the EU. On the one hand, the EU aspires to the ideal of expansive borders, even while the project of enlargement itself has stalled. Yet migration has acted as a stressor to this tendency, encouraging states to independently adopt their own, often securitized, immigration policies – moving further apart rather than towards the ideal of an “ever closer union” (Mitzen, 2018: 1373). While this has often conflicted with human rights norms, these norms are equally an inseparable part of the securitization project: attempts at border management have emphasized the need to both protect EU citizens and migrants themselves, who may fall victim to smugglers and traffickers (Bilgic et al., 2020: 11).

Externalization – in which transit countries are enlisted as partners to prevent irregular migration – has furthered rights-related ontological insecurities. While rhetoric about protecting migrants from traffickers was reaffirmed in the 2023 Memorandum of Understanding, high-profile reports of the expulsion of migrants to Tunisia’s desolate borderlands regions has ensured that these anxieties continue to resurface (Cordall, 2024). As Haastrup, Duggan and Mah persuasively argue, EU foreign policy in general has been geared towards trying to “bring others closer to its own way of thinking about how the world is and should work” (Haastrup et al., 2021: 544) – a project shaken to its core by externalization.

Consequently, cooperation with Tunisia over migration governance provided material benefits while also challenging European ideals. Lavenex (2001) theorizes the need to balance securitization with human rights norms as a conflict between realism and liberalism; Griffini and Rosina (2025) identify how this tension informs externalization. Migration aid frequently exacerbates autocratic tendencies in the receiving state through strengthening its security capabilities (Norman & Micinski, 2023), creating an ontological paradox for the EU. Indeed, debates within the European Parliament (EP) over migration cooperation with Tunisia often hinge on a trade-off between Europe’s need for externalized migration partnerships versus materially supporting a repressive regime (European Parliament, 2024). This ontological balancing act has led to idiosyncratic expectations. Since Saied’s coup, European leaders have exerted pressure on Saied to restore democratic norms. Saied, for his part, rejected what he terms “unacceptable foreign interference” (Roggero, 2024). Moreover, Saied’s racialized rhetoric scapegoating migrants and Tunisia’s problematic migration governance practices – such as the expulsion of migrants to the Libyan and Algerian borders without due process – challenge the European Union’s stated values of human rights, furthering ontological anxieties (Diez & von Lucke, 2024: 8).

Returning to the question of populist foreign policy and cooperation, Tunisia as a case study highlights how mediation between civilizational populist actors can legitimize an ideologically problematic, yet strategically pragmatic, deal in the face of economic pressures and structural inequality. Approaching civilizational populist cooperation from an ontological security perspective offers that shared civilizational ideals may be more impactful than belonging to the same perceived ‘civilization’ (Bettiza et al., 2023: 10-11). While the European Union itself could be presented as an actor threatening Tunisia’s sovereignty, Meloni’s mediating efforts emphasized shared values with Saied, affirming his desire to avoid Tunisia becoming a location of resettlement for migrants.

The Memorandum of Understanding and Its Controversies

In June 2023, Giorgia Meloni, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with Kais Saied; in July, the European Union and Tunisia agreed upon a Memorandum of Understanding. The deal covered a range of topics, but migration was one of its key tenets. In her press statement, von der Leyen referred to the need to adopt a comprehensive approach to “cooperate on border management, anti-smuggling, return and addressing root causes, in full respect of the international law” (European Commission, 2023). Over €100 million of non-contingent funding would be dedicated to disrupting irregular migration, with another €900 million offered as a loan provided an agreement with the IMF could be reached. The deal affirmed that Tunisia’s approach to border management would respect human rights, but offered minimal details as to how this would be accomplished.

Saied’s relationship with the IMF had been historically shaky. He had publicly declined an IMF deal of over €1.9 billion earlier that year; one of the IMF’s recommendations was to eliminate costly state subsidies to balance the budget, which Saied claimed would force a significant amount of the population into poverty (The New Arab, 2023). Stating his categorical rejection of “foreign diktats,” he used language of sovereignty to underline that Tunisia was “not for sale” (Bajec, 2023). The stalling of the deal, however, caused Tunisia’s economic situation to worsen further and spooked other potential lenders; the MoU thus came as an economic and political lifeline.

In the official press release from the Tunisian presidential office following the meeting with Meloni, Rutte and von der Leyen, Saied emphasized several points. Affirming the “unnatural” nature of the current migration crisis, he again pointed to a hidden intention among some parties to resettle migrants within the country (Ri’āsat al-Jumhūriyyah al-Tūnisiyyah, 2023a). He also hinted at continued opposition to the IMF deal: shortly after speaking with von der Leyen, Meloni and Rutte, he stated to a domestic audience that “There is no sura in the Quran named after the IMF” (International Crisis Group, 2023: 12).

Large portions of the Tunisian press reported favorably on the agreement, stressing the imminent need for funding: one journalist noted that aid should be imminent given “the acuteness of the migration crisis Tunisia is facing” (Jelassi, 2023). Another article published shortly after the conclusion of the MoU praised Saied for taking a “sovereigntist” approach, though worried that, in effect, Tunisia would be expected to act as the “policeman of the Mediterranean” on Europe’s behalf (Le Temps, 2023a). Members of an opposition party made this point more overtly, demonstrating at the Italian embassy against so-called “agreement on irregular migration concluded in dark rooms” (Le Temps, 2023c).

The deal was met with even more controversy within the EU. The MoU was criticized for lack of transparency and inattention to human rights. Some MEPs stated that they found the MoU “deeply concerning given the worsening of migrants’ rights in the country, including collective expulsions at unsafe borders, violations during interceptions at sea, and arrests of Black African migrants by police” (European Parliament, 2023). Moreover, they questioned what independent human rights monitoring and accountability mechanisms would exist (European Parliament, 2023). Similarly, the Foreign Minister of Germany suggested that the deal had procedural deficiencies and criticized its inattention to human rights (Meddeb & Louati, 2024: 17). European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly also raised concerns in September 2023 over human rights, requesting details as to how the Commission planned to conduct a transparent human rights impact assessment. Her statement raised the specter of whether the Commission would consider “potential suspensions of funds due to non-respect for human rights” (European Ombudsman, 2023) highlighting the ontological tension between rights and securitization.

This reception in turn spurred some pushback from the Tunisian side, particularly given the power imbalances between Europe and Tunisia that accompanied the emphasis on rights. Consequently, the Kais Saied regime asserted its leverage, in an example of how migration diplomacy can temporarily reconfigure power dynamics (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2019: 118). In September 2023, Tunisia denied entry to several MEPs, including two who had vocally opposed the MoU (Geddie, 2023). The larger point of contention was the conditionality for dispersing the bulk of the funding: Tunisia’s acceptance of IMF mandates, which underscored the realities of EU-Tunisia power dynamics (Fernández-Molina & Tsourapas, 2024: 2470-2471). Consequently, in press releases following meetings with ministers, Saied emphasized that “state sovereignty is above all considerations” and that cooperation must be based on “mutual respect” (Ri’āsat al-Jumhūriyyah al-Tūnisiyyah, 2023b).

In October 2023, Saied publicly sent back €60 million to the EU, which had been part of an unrelated aid program. He opined that “The treasures of the world are not equal to a single grain of sovereignty” and rejected what he termed “charity” and partnerships based on a lack of respect (European Council on Refugees and Exiles, 2023). This was interpreted as a gambit: by protesting the relatively low amount offered and advocating for the full implementation of the deal, Saied was implicitly pushing back against the terms of the deal that coupled the bulk of the funding with the IMF agreement (Meddeb & Louati, 2024: 18).

Restoration of Relations through Saied-Meloni Cooperation

Shortly after the Saied-EU relationship threatened to sour, Italian diplomacy attempted to mend the gap. For years, Italy has emerged as a leader within the EU over topics like irregular migration (Talbot & Fruganti, 2023) and has been a pioneer in brokering externalization agreements (Ceccorulli, 2024: 170). Indeed, on October 20, 2023, Saied hosted a group of Italian ministers to discuss several issues, including a migration agreement between the two countries. In the press release, Saied affirmed that Tunisia had honored its obligations, including disrupting trafficking networks preying on migrants (Ri’āsat al-Jumhūriyyah al-Tūnisiyyah, 2023c).

Meloni’s government, whose immigration policies were under fire internally – in October 2023, a judge blocked a deportation order by citing that Tunisia was an “unsafe country” (Carbonaro, 2023) – advocated strongly for the resuscitation of the deal. Meloni took care to express support for Saied in the period after he rejected the €60 million, affirming that negotiations between Europe and Africa had to be premised on respect rather than top-down dictates (Ben Slama, 2023). Before a European Council meeting, she stated that a lack of respect on the European side was the source of the problem (Al-Shurūq, 2023a). Matteo Piantedosi, Italy’s Interior Minister, urged the EU to implement the deal in its entirety. Saied was in part successful; in December 2023, the Tunisian Macroeconomic Reform Support Programme (PARME) was concluded between the two entities, offering Tunisia €150 million to support “economic reforms and financial stability” even in the absence of an IMF agreement (European Commission, 2024).

Meloni and Saied affirmed several key points: they emphasized that Tunisia will not be a host for irregular migrants, and that cooperation must include a more comprehensive approach to development deterring migration altogether (La Presse, 2024). Italy’s Mattei Plan for Africa, which promotes engagement between Europe and the African continent from a perspective of exchange and collaboration, involves funding the development of industries within African countries. Meloni has emphasized that preventing migration requires a “non-predatory” approach (The Arab Weekly, 2023). Her vision has shaped the approach of non-civilizational actors that form part of her government: for example, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Tajani, from the Forza Italia party, has similarly emphasized the need for development and migration governance to be linked to address the causes of migration (Capurso, 2023).

Migration governance beyond security – accounting for how poverty acts as a driver towards migration – has also affected Italy’s approach to the IMF. In June 2023, Meloni stressed that she supported a “pragmatic” approach to the IMF deal (The Arab Weekly, 2023). In other statements, she has stressed the critical importance of Tunisian stability, informing EU officials that Tunisian instability threatens to send even more migrants towards Italy (Farrell, 2023). This rhetoric aligns with Saied’s own attempts to use the prospect of mass migration to exert pressure on the EU.

Meloni was presented in the Tunisian press as a counterpoint to Saied. In La Presse, a major Tunisian newspaper, one journalist commented that “In the face of European failure, Italy has shown a cooperative spirit through both positive statements and concrete actions,” adding that the two countries share converging views on many issues, including migration (Hlaoui, 2023). While the European Union was associated with the IMF’s demands, Italy was seen as pragmatic and respecting mutual independence (Hlaoui, 2023). Italy was often portrayed as understanding Tunisia’s priorities in a way that other EU countries did not (Ben Slama, 2023).

This paper argues that Meloni’s cooperation with Saied is premised on three tenets deriving in part from shared civilizational populist alignment: complementary ideology, sensitivity to power gradations and appearance of mutual benefit. It argues that this is substantiated through a performance of distance from the European Union – for example, Meloni has been critical of the “sense of superiority” often displayed in Europe-Africa dealings (Al-Shurūq, 2023) even while this ultimately increases her standing within the EU itself.

Complementary Ideology

The shared tenets of Meloni and Saied’s civilizational populism affirm Tunisia’s approach in the face of rights-based criticisms. The two describe immigration in similar terms, with attention to demographics: prior to becoming Prime Minister, Meloni posted on her social media that left wing governments were “[proposing] to fund the invasion to replace Italians with immigrants” (Indelicato & Lopez, 2024: 13). Indeed, the prospect of an “invasion” was used by Italian officials to push the IMF to show flexibility towards Tunisia (Balmer, 2023). Saied’s fears of demographic change are thus mirrored by the Italian regime’s rhetoric, and the two have both adopted securitization policies – albeit to different degrees of severity – towards NGOs assisting migrants (Dumont, 2024; Amnesty International, 2024). Saied’s repression of migrants – to both discourage transiting through Tunisia and to relocate them away from Tunisian citizens – which have attracted criticism from other sectors of the EU are sidestepped by Meloni, who presents herself as respecting sovereignty in the face of elitist, foreign pressure.

Sensitivity to Power Gradations

The EU-North Africa relationship has been characterized by a fundamental asymmetry, leading to profound concerns on the Tunisian side about paternalism and neocolonialism. Haastrup, Duggan and Mah (2021) consider this asymmetry to be an aspect of the EU’s ontological security and sense of self, where the project of externalizing EU norms precludes an equal engagement on behalf of the ‘Other.’ As an area in direct proximity to Europe, this dynamic is particularly pronounced in North Africa, where concerns about sovereignty arise frequently. European concern over hints at Tunisia’s pursuing deeper relationships with China, Russia and Iran are met with strong disapproval from both Saied and civil society, for example (Snoussi, 2024). Italy is well-poised to act as a critic of the asymmetrical nature of Western engagement with the Global South, a stance that has been adopted by members of other parties who do not share Meloni’s civilizationism (Tajani, 2023). Meloni accelerates this tendency, presenting Italy as an ‘underdog’ vis-à-vis other EU members, creating a sense of symbolic distance between the two and allowing for a lateral solidarity with Tunisia. For example, Meloni has bemoaned a lack of EU solidarity with Italy over addressing the migration issue, given how Italy is more directly confronted with migration than other nations (Scazzieri, 2022). The pragmatism resulting from an acknowledgment of mutual need establishes Italy in an intermediary position, where it can negotiate with Tunisia on a seemingly more equal footing.

Appearance of Mutual Benefit

This positioning allows for the deal to be constructed as a cooperative, rather than coerced, arrangement palatable to the sovereignty of both entities. Using Adamson and Tsourapas’ terminology, this allows Tunisia to approach migration diplomacy not from a zero-sum calculus, but from a positive-sum perspective that believes both sides can benefit (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2019: 122). In using migration as leverage in dealing with the EU, Saied asserts that irregular immigrants and Tunisians are victims of an unequal global economic system, and as such Tunisia cannot simply accept to become Europe’s border guard (Al-Shurūq, 2024). In other words, Saied’s approach suggests that if the EU succeeds in its aims, Tunisia will lose, and his actions are intended to extract the maximum benefit from the EU while conceding as little as possible. On the other hand, while the EU’s focus on human rights chafes against Saied’s priorities, Italy’s Mattei plan is premised on a more palatable set of assumptions. Meloni suggests that by restructuring global inequality, the need for migration will be negated. As she puts it, cooperation according to this model will result in “the liberation of Africa from some Europeans” (The Arab Weekly, 2023). Consequently, Tunisia-Italian relations are frequently touted by Saied and other government officials as a model of respect for sovereignty, in contrast with the internal inconsistencies of the EU’s approach (Al-Shurūq, 2023b).

Discussion: Comparative Implications

Despite its specificities, the Tunisia-Italy-European relationship provides a lens through which to study populist foreign policy between various nodes, with comparative implications. As case studies around the globe exemplify, competition is particularly effective when populists can position themselves as outsiders vis-à-vis an international organization. Scholars have noted that civilizational populists are not inherently adverse to cooperation when they identify a similar primary threat; the Orbán-Erdoğan dynamic highlights that anti-Western sentiments can facilitate alignments between civilizational populists of different traditions (Dudlak, 2025: 634). Similarly, Yilmaz and Morieson (2022b) find that anti-colonialism and anti-Westernism can connect civilizational populists across geographies, as exemplified by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his attempts to align with anti-Western leaders from the Middle East and North Africa. Brazil under Bolsonaro also deepened its international cooperation in international fora with conservative Muslim-majority countries under the grounds of protecting the family (Lehoczki, 2023: 188).

Yet this paper also complicates a strict binary between civilizational populists and international institutions. While populists may performatively position themselves as external to European Union, they may nevertheless accrue soft power by advancing the EU’s goals. Combative rhetoric may mask a cooperative reality: far from taking an isolationist approach, figures from the Italian government have called for greater international cooperation to address irregular migration (Borselli, 2023). Nevertheless, performative distancing from perceived EU hypocrisy has empowered populists like Meloni to reach figures like Saied. The future will likely see more populist migration entrepreneurs, given the salience of this issue and the existing tensions within the EU over its securitization and the power asymmetries typically present within externalization agreements. This ambiguous dynamic between civilizational populists and the European Union invites reflection on how civilizational thinking has become normalized within international institutions.

Conclusion: The Normalization of Civilizational Thinking

The controversies over the MoU suggest that the ontological tensions within the EU’s approach to migration have tipped towards securitization. The normalization of civilizational rhetoric among mainstream politicians lends support for this conclusion. In 2022, EU High Representative Josep Borrell delivered his now-infamous ‘garden’ and ‘jungle’ speech. Opining before the European Diplomatic Academy, he compared Europe to a garden where “Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build.” In contrast, he mused, “The rest of the world […] is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden […] The gardeners will have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means,”(European Union External Action, 2022).

The remarks were immediately controversial, with accusations of racist and neocolonial undertones; Borrell delivered a lukewarm apology shortly thereafter (Lynch, 2022). However, its underpinning assumptions – that rather than build walls, Europe must invest in making other places more desirable to prevent migration, explicitly analogized to “invasion,” bears striking similarities to the securitized rhetoric about migration advanced by civilizational populists. Aspects of the Italian government’s securitized approach to migration – the differentiation between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ countries for forced repatriation, devising local alternatives to emigration – have been encoded into the European Union Pact on Immigration and Asylum concluded in December 2023 (Ambrosini, 2025: 15-16). The degree to which this discourse has become mainstream reflects that civilizationism can be – and is – frequently divorced from populism. Far from being divorced from the liberal international order, it has increasingly informed the foreign policy of international organizations like the EU. This may derive from a desire to out-compete populists, or simply because populists’ views are not as separate from those of ‘mainstream’ parties as they might appear (Mondon, 2022).

This article suggests that the intercession of civilizational populist intermediaries smooths the ontological anxieties of both the transit country and the European Union. The self-image of the European Union has been severely threatened by migration, leading to contradictory tendencies. On one hand, the securitization of migration has become increasingly mainstream, incentivizing the externalization of migration governance through partnerships with countries like Tunisia. On the other, ontological anxiety with regards to the EU’s core values leads to these partnerships generating controversy on grounds of human rights. The result is the imposition of impractical demands on countries like Tunisia, where they are meant to conduct border management and deter irregular migration while also respecting human rights – leading to a perception of top-down hypocrisy.

The ideology underpinning Meloni’s approach to foreign policy within Africa resolves this tension through a cooperative version of civilizational populism: through promoting economic development, she hopes to eliminate the root causes of migration. Rather than offering cash for border control in a process that reinforces existing power relations, she purports to offers a comprehensive approach capable of reorienting them. Crucially, she does so without insistence on human rights compliance: she has offered vocal criticism of those declaring Tunisia to be an “unsafe country,” suggesting that the problem with Europe’s dealings with North African nations has been a fundamental lack of respect (Al-Shurūq, 2023a). To populist leaders like Saied sensitive to accusations of foreign interference, this is an easier partnership to rationalize than the perceived paternalism of the EU. Borrell’s ‘garden and jungle’ metaphor is often referenced in the Tunisian press, often with an emphasis that Tunisia has no inherent responsibility to halt migration to Europe, and as such the latter must negotiate from a place of equality and mutual benefit (Sayyari, 2023).

Yet the tentative accord facilitated by Italian-Tunisian cooperation may prove temporary. Such alignments can be accelerated by necessity and power imbalances: indeed, the Tunisian deal has functioned as a blueprint for similar migration agreements with Egypt and Mauritania in 2024 (van Moorsel & Bonfiglio, 2024). Reports of human rights abuses towards migrants with partner countries continue to surface, prompting EU action. In response, the European Commission has stated that that it will institute new guidelines to ensure that human rights would be respected (Townsend, 2025). Until the underlying assumptions behind the practice of externalizing migration governance to autocratic populist countries is reimagined, these ontological contradictions will likely be recurrent.