Maghreb Neighbours Close Ranks on Migration as Libya's Stalemate Drags On

North Africa's neighbours are drawing closer on the issues that keep their interior ministers awake — migration, smuggling and porous borders — even as the region's central political wound, Libya's frozen transition, remains unhealed.

Libya, Algeria and Tunisia have held a second meeting of their joint working group on border security in Tripoli, discussing cooperation against organised crime and terrorism alongside measures to curb irregular migration. The three countries have also agreed to convene a joint taskforce to align their migration policies — a pragmatic axis formed as the central Mediterranean route continues to funnel people north through their territories toward Europe.

The migration question has transformed the region's politics. Tunisia has become a major transit hub, with all the policy dilemmas and human tragedies that entails; Libya's coastline remains the launch point for crossings that regularly turn deadly; and Algeria patrols vast Saharan frontiers across which smuggling networks operate. European pressure — and European money — has pushed the three governments toward coordination that their otherwise prickly relations might not have produced.

On Libya's political crisis, the diplomacy grinds on with less to show. Egypt hosted the foreign ministers of Algeria and Tunisia under the Tripartite Neighbouring Countries Mechanism, reaffirming that a comprehensive political settlement under UN auspices — ending institutional division and leading to simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections — remains the only path out. The elections in question were originally scheduled for December 2021; they remain indefinitely postponed, with stakeholders still deadlocked over the constitutional basis for holding them.

The contrast tells the region's story: on security, North Africa's governments can find common cause quickly. On the politics that produce the insecurity, the wait stretches into its sixth year.