France and Tunisia appear to have turned a page on the bruising ‘visa row’ of 2021-2022. In an interview published on November 27, 2025, France’s Consul-General in Tunis, Dominique Mas, said that his staff rejected only 18.3 % of the 118,000 visa applications lodged by Tunisians between January and October – barely half the refusal rate seen at the height of the dispute. Short-stay refusals have fallen even further, to 13 %, despite a six-per-cent jump in overall demand.
Behind the numbers lies a deliberate political reset. Paris lifted the quota-based restrictions it imposed in 2021 to pressure North-African partners on forced-return cooperation, and has since tried to rebuild confidence with business leaders, universities and civil-society groups. Campus France has doubled down on pre-departure counselling to help applicants submit ‘clean’ files, while the embassy has prioritised long-term visas that support academic and professional mobility. Half of all visas issued to Tunisians this year are now valid for more than a year – a radical shift toward multi-year travel rights.
![France slashes Tunisia visa refusal rate to 18 % in major consular policy thaw]()
Student mobility is the immediate winner. More than 5,000 study visas were approved in the first ten months of 2025 – a 9 % annual increase – pushing the population of Tunisian students enrolled in French higher-education programmes to almost 16,000. Consulate officials say the trend dovetails with France’s talent-attraction strategy and helps narrow labour-market gaps in engineering, IT and health care;
for multinationals, it also enlarges the pool of bilingual graduates who can rotate between Tunisia and EU postings without lengthy immigration formalities.
Practically, employers and relocation managers should expect faster appointment slots and fewer ‘ 221-g-style’ document requests for Tunisian assignees. However, bottlenecks remain: some 6,700 appointments were cancelled this year because applicants failed to complete files on time. HR teams are therefore advised to keep monitoring the TLS/France-Visas scheduling tool and to build in contingency time for last-minute document uploads.
Strategically, the policy thaw could become a blueprint for France’s relations with Algeria and Morocco, where refusal rates are still above 30 %. If the experiment in Tunis continues to deliver security cooperation and orderly migration flows, business lobbyists expect Paris to extend similar facilitation measures across the Maghreb in 2026.
Behind the numbers lies a deliberate political reset. Paris lifted the quota-based restrictions it imposed in 2021 to pressure North-African partners on forced-return cooperation, and has since tried to rebuild confidence with business leaders, universities and civil-society groups. Campus France has doubled down on pre-departure counselling to help applicants submit ‘clean’ files, while the embassy has prioritised long-term visas that support academic and professional mobility. Half of all visas issued to Tunisians this year are now valid for more than a year – a radical shift toward multi-year travel rights.
Student mobility is the immediate winner. More than 5,000 study visas were approved in the first ten months of 2025 – a 9 % annual increase – pushing the population of Tunisian students enrolled in French higher-education programmes to almost 16,000. Consulate officials say the trend dovetails with France’s talent-attraction strategy and helps narrow labour-market gaps in engineering, IT and health care;
for multinationals, it also enlarges the pool of bilingual graduates who can rotate between Tunisia and EU postings without lengthy immigration formalities.
Practically, employers and relocation managers should expect faster appointment slots and fewer ‘ 221-g-style’ document requests for Tunisian assignees. However, bottlenecks remain: some 6,700 appointments were cancelled this year because applicants failed to complete files on time. HR teams are therefore advised to keep monitoring the TLS/France-Visas scheduling tool and to build in contingency time for last-minute document uploads.
Strategically, the policy thaw could become a blueprint for France’s relations with Algeria and Morocco, where refusal rates are still above 30 %. If the experiment in Tunis continues to deliver security cooperation and orderly migration flows, business lobbyists expect Paris to extend similar facilitation measures across the Maghreb in 2026.
