BRUSSELS — The lead Socialist candidate for the EU election, Nicolas Schmit, slammed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over a deal she struck with other EU leaders in 2023 to curb migration into the bloc from Tunisia.
“This is not Europe, these are not European values, this is an agreement with a very special nasty dictatorship,” Schmit, who is Luxembourg’s European commissioner, said in a blistering rebuke to his boss at the EU executive. Von der Leyen is running for a second term as Commission president as the lead candidate for the European People’s Party.
“I suppose that you know what’s going on in Tunisia what happens with the refugees who are pushed into the desert, who are really beaten up, some of them killed,” Schmit told her at an EU election debate organized by the European Broadcasting Union in the European Parliament on Thursday.
Schmit referred to a recent investigative article published by a group of media outlets — including French daily Le Monde, Lighthouse Reports, and the Washington Post — unveiling how North African countries have been detaining migrants and pushing them into desert areas, with the EU’s support.
The European Commission struck a deal worth hundreds of millions of euros with the Tunisian government in 2023, offering economic support in exchange for a clampdown on irregular migration to the EU. Since then similar deals have followed between the EU and Egypt and Mauritania.
“Don’t tell us it’s about fighting the smugglers; it’s about fighting the refugees that are pushed to the desert and many of them die,” Schmit told von der Leyen moments after she had argued for the EU to have a greater say on who enters its borders.
It was a full-on attack from the jobs and social rights commissioner who has mostly avoided directly criticizing his boss during the campaign so far.
Schmit parried criticism from the liberals’ lead debater Sandro Gozi who said that French and Italian center-left MEPs refused to back the EU’s recently minted migration pact; Schmit said he was in favor of it though it could and should be improved.
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