France and the United Kingdom stage their reconciliation after five years of tensions with a migratory pact

France and the United Kingdom, after half a decade marked by the Brexit dispute, have sealed their reconciliation this Friday with an agreement to strengthen controls on the passage of migrants in the English Channel.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed in Paris to create a detention center on French territory and increase the number of agents patrolling the French coast.

London, in return, will increase funding for the joint police effort to prevent the arrival of irregular migrants on British shores in the coming years.

From the almost 300 without papers who crossed the sea to reach British territory in 2018 to the almost 46,000 last year, migration has become one of the biggest problems of the British Conservative government.

The collaboration of Paris, insists Downing Street, is essential.

The departure of the United Kingdom from the EU, in 2020, left this country without the legal and political framework to manage immigration together with its former partners.

"It is time for a new beginning," Macron proclaimed at a press conference with Sunak at the Élysée Palace.

The complicity gestures of both leaders were revealing for the British press, which has spent years reporting a growing enmity.

"If we are honest about the relationship between our two countries, it has had its challenges in recent years," recalled the British Prime Minister.

“Today we have taken cooperation to an unprecedented level.”

The new collaboration spans from energy to defense to warfare in Ukraine.

On all these issues, the president and prime minister strove to exhibit a harmony that contrasts with the tension that has dominated the relationship between Paris and London since the eve of Brexit and specifically during the Boris Johnson years.

He constantly made fun of Macron in public;

the French leader privately considered Johnson a "clown."

The old cordial entente reached its nadir when Liz Truss, Johnson's short-lived successor at 10 Downing Street, went so far as to say during the primary campaign to lead the Conservative Party that she was not sure if the French president was "friend ” or “enemy”.

Now, five years after the last bilateral summit, a French president and a British

meet again and they do so with the intention of making a clean slate.

Brexit is already a reality, Johnson and Truss have left the scene and Sunak, in office since last October, shares a lot with Macron: the generation (Sunak, 42 ​​years old; Macron, 44), a professional past in banking investment and an image of liberal technocrats.

Ending litigation in the post-Brexit era

The British Prime Minister has taken advantage of the momentum achieved with the signing of the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, which he presented last week together with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to open a new chapter in the stormy relations between the Kingdom Kingdom and the EU.

With this agreement, an attempt is made to put an end to the dispute that both blocks dragged regarding the Northern Ireland reserve in the post-Brexit era.

The next urgency for the British Prime Minister was to rebuild the relationship with France, a key country to solve the crisis of irregular immigrants by sharing the common maritime border of the English Channel.

The Conservatives' electoral survival largely depends on Sunak's ability to remedy the situation.

Faced with criticism from the hard wing of his party for what he interprets as the ineffectiveness of the money delivered to the French government to increase police controls on the channel (some 130 million euros since 2015), Sunak has defended continuing to cooperate.

The bilateral meeting has served to announce a new British commitment to contribute more than 540 million euros, over three years, to build a new immigration retention center on French territory, and increase the police effort to control the coast .

Macron recalled at the press conference that France, in collaboration with the British authorities, had already prevented, in 2022, the passage of 1,300 boats and detained more than 400 people.

"Emmanuel and I share the same belief: criminal gangs should not be the ones who decide who enters our countries," said Sunak, referring to the traffickers who organize the crossings through the English Channel.

Sunak and Macron have not addressed at the summit the request that Downing Street has been making to the Elysée for years: the return to France of intercepted irregular immigrants who arrive in the United Kingdom from its shores.

President Macron has already made it clear that such an agreement cannot be signed between the two countries, but requires an understanding between the UK and the EU.

The disagreements in recent years between Paris and London went beyond the clash of personalities between Macron and Johnson, and even Brexit.

France has not digested the rupture in 2021, by Australia and after secretly forging it together with London and Washington, of the contract to buy French submarines.

The Aukus exclusion, the agreement for the Indo-Pacific region between Australia, the US and the UK, still stings in Paris.

Fights over fishing licenses in the English Channel also helped to poison the relationship during the Brexit years.

Macron and Sunak's message this Friday is that shared interests and values ​​far outweigh differences.

Both lead the only two nuclear powers in Western Europe and have a seat on the UN Security Council.

Regarding Ukraine, and despite the fact that London has maintained a more belligerent and clear-cut position in support of Kiev since the invasion of February 2022, they agreed: now is the time to help the country resist and launch the counteroffensive;

and it will be Ukraine, when it wishes and on its terms, that decides whether it is possible to negotiate a lasting peace with Russia.

The summit, and the trip of King Carlos III to France starting on March 26 (his first visit abroad since he succeeded Elizabeth II to the throne in September), must symbolize the recovered friendship.

Added to the recent agreement on Northern Ireland, they make it possible to normalize the relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union after the divorce and the turbulence of the last five years.

It is a return to France and, in its own way, to Europe.

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