In mid-February, Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chahed arrived in Berlin to discuss the issues the two countries have over security and migration. A few weeks prior, Anis Amri, a Tunisian national who was living illegally in Germany under six aliases after his asylum application was denied, drove a truck through a crowded Christmas market in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood. A dozen people were killed.

Germany and Tunisia have long had a mutually positive relationship, bolstered by the European Union granting Tunisia privileged partnership status in 2012. Since Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, Germany has been a vocal supporter of the country’s democratic transition; several German nongovernmental organizations have set up offices in Tunisia. With its proximity to Libya, Tunisia is also geostrategically important to Germany. But “the security concern only emerged recently. Prior to that, migration was not a controversial issue in the Tunisian-German relations as it is now,” said Nizar Amri, a research fellow at the Tunisian-German research group Tunisia in Transition.

After the attack, Germany pointed fingers at Tunisia, where bureaucratic delays failed to deport Amri, as he no longer had his documents (he destroyed them upon first arriving in Europe via Sicily). Chahed’s visit was an opportunity for the two countries to seriously discuss migration, but it was marred with tension. "The biggest problem for Europe is refugees who go from Libya to Italy," Chahed told German newspaper Bild during the visit. Chahed also outright refused a German proposal that Tunisia build a refugee camp to process migrants.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Chahed to take back more Tunisians who have been denied asylum. “We have to tell someone who doesn’t commit to voluntarily departure that he must also do it involuntarily,” she said during a press conference on Feb. 14.