France and Britain are stitching up the wound opened by Brexit. French President Emmanuel Macron received British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the Élysée last week in the first official visit to Paris by a 10 Downing Street tenant since Boris Johnson last did so in 2019. Leaders staged a reunion between the two nations five years after the referendum that sparked Britain’s traumatic departure from the European Union.

Tensions have been a constant in the post-Brexit era. The bilateral crisis worsened in September 2021 after the announcement Aukus, the military agreement signed this week, which was signed on the chest by Anglosphere to provide nuclear submarines to Australia with the aim of countering China’s increased military presence in the Indo-Pacific. Friction came to the fore as France had positioned itself as Australia’s arms supplier, but emergence on the scene in the United States and Britain removed the Elysee from the equation. The signed contract remains on paper.

Submarines would not be ready for another two decades, but just signing the treaty would be a setback to French aspirations in the Indo-Pacific, a region where influence has been lost to its own allies. . Aware of the breach, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, had a telephone conversation with Macron hours before publicly presenting the project to keep him informed. The apparent harmony on both sides of the Atlantic has served to partially direct the situation, but the Élysée has not forgotten that hint, nor does it ignore the role played by England at that time.

Aukus isn’t the only front where their interests collide. Fishing rights in the English Channel have also poisoned French-British relations in the past five years. Tensions reached a fever pitch in 2021, when the French and British navies They deployed warships in Jersey during an attempted confrontation between fishing vessels. The problem is not reaching the majors.

Overall, the migration crisis is probably the file that pushed their agenda the most. The British government has allocated some 130 million euros to the Elysée since 2015 to strengthen controls on the channel, but the number of migrants leaving French shores to reach the UK is growing. Fewer than 300 undocumented people arrived in Britain after crossing the English Channel in 2018. In just five years, the volume reaching British shores has grown exponentially. In 2022, there are more than 45,000 people, according to official figures.

“If we are being honest, relations between our countries have had a hard time in recent years,” Sunak told a news conference after meeting with Macron. “Today’s meeting marks a new beginning”. The French president took up the challenge: “We must remedy the consequences of Brexit. Maybe some of the consequences were underestimated, but we have to fix that.”

The statistics bring out the colors of the Conservative Party, in Government since the painful ‘Yes’ victory in the Brexit referendum. That story they made border control one of their main arguments for leaving. But they are far from keeping their word. Among other things because the EU exit left Great Britain without a legal framework to manage migration. Time is running out for Sunak, who must solve problems if he is to survive beyond the 2024 elections.

Her relationship with Macron was evident during him tête a tête in the Elysees. Both very young for their positions (Macron 44; Sunak, 42), they stand out for their marked neoliberal profiles and share successful careers in the financial sector. Both worked as investment bankers, and later amassed substantial fortunes in the private sector, before entering the political arena. The two also rule two countries that are currently experiencing massive strikes and strong social upheavals. They speak the same language, they understand each other.

A new beginning 🇬🇧🤝🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/8UlUy2NWrs

—Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) March 10, 2023

It has nothing to do with the bitter relationship that Macron and Boris Johnson had in their day. They hate each other. The short-lived Liz Truss doesn’t even have enough time to get to know Macron in depth, even though she says it does I don’t know what it is “friend or foe”. Another case with Sunak.

Therefore, it is not surprising that they reached a series of agreements on immigration matters. They covered construction of a new immigration detention center in the Dunkerque area, a new command center with teams concentrated in the same area, a reinforcement of 500 agents to patrol the coast and more drones and surveillance technology. Funding was provided by the UK, which will contribute more than 540 million euros to France over the next three years. But Macron did not give the green light for British asylum seekers to be returned to French soil, as Sunak had demanded. For the Élysée it is the red line. The French president made it clear that this issue must be decided in negotiations where the other EU members have a say.

Beyond the migration dossier, another compelling reason that has facilitated the rapprochement of bilateral relations is their status as western allies, strengthened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although Britain’s military aid to Kyiv is far higher than France’s, Macron considers the dialogue window with Putin and diplomatic concessions to Russia to have been amortized. Add to that the fact that France and Britain are the only two nuclear powers in Europe, with permanent seats on the UN Security Council.

The rapprochement with France by England was interpreted as rapprochement with Twenty-seven as a whole. Macron congratulated Sunak on a “new start” sponsored by the so-called windsor framework agreementsigned two weeks ago with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, which ended a bitter dispute between London and Brussels over post-Brexit trading rules in Northern Ireland.