Madbouly Took Egypt’s Croatia Labor File to Luanda

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly met Croatia’s Andrej Plenković in Luanda on 24 November 2025 to revive idle port and labor files.

He stood in for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at the seventh African Union-European Union summit. The Croatian meeting was about ships, jobs, and Cairo papers that had not yet moved.

Madbouly Carried a Bilateral File Into Luanda

Madbouly arrived in the Angolan capital on Monday, 24 November 2025, with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and Egypt’s ambassador to Angola, Neveen el Hussieny. He was booked to deliver Egypt’s address in the opening plenary on peace, security, governance, and multilateralism. Before that speech, he sat down with Plenković.

Leaders of both unions gathered for the seventh EU-AU summit in Luanda on 24 and 25 November 2025, 25 years after the first meeting in Cairo. The published theme was promoting peace and prosperity through effective multilateralism. Co-chairs were Angolan President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, European Council President António Costa, AU Commission Chairperson Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Madbouly treated the Croatian session as unfinished business from February. He thanked Zagreb for backing Egypt’s comprehensive strategic partnership with the European Union, and for Plenković’s place at the working dinner held for al-Sisi at the first Egypt-EU summit in Brussels in October 2025. He then said trade still failed to match that political line, and he named energy, tourism, shipbuilding, and a roll-on roll-off link for perishable farm goods heading to Croatia and on into Eastern Europe.

Plenković, for his part, put Egypt down as a key partner in the EU’s Pact for the Mediterranean and talked through Croatia’s MED-9 presidency. The Croatian government said he invited Madbouly to visit Croatia after the official trip to Cairo in February 2025. Madbouly accepted.

THE 2025 EGYPT-CROATIA CALENDAR

1. January 2025: Madbouly and Plenković meet on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos and discuss a Ro-Ro line plus skilled labor for Croatia.
2. 18 February 2025: Plenković visits Cairo with about 20 Croatian firms, and the two governments sign culture, investment, and port papers.
3. October 2025: Plenković attends a working dinner in Brussels held for al-Sisi at the first Egypt-EU summit.
4. 1 November 2025: Croatian President Zoran Milanović is in Cairo for the Grand Egyptian Museum, then opens a sphinx exhibition in Alexandria.
5. 24 November 2025: The two prime ministers meet again in Luanda and Madbouly asks for the February papers to be activated.

That sequence is the relationship the summit hall did not have to invent. The workers were already in Croatia. The port memo was already signed. Luanda was the reminder.

Madbouly Counted About 7,000 Egyptians in Croatia

The live file was labor. Madbouly said Egypt was ready to send trained workers for construction and tourism, and he put the number already on Croatian sites at about 7,000. He welcomed more hiring through a regulated channel. Plenković said he wanted to widen skilled labor mobility too.

In Cairo on 18 February 2025, Madbouly had used a lower round figure, about 6,000, and Plenković had already placed Egyptians among the ten largest foreign workforces in Croatia. Luka Burilović, president of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce, told the business forum that followed that Egyptian inflows had climbed from 22 work permits in 2020 to more than 6,500 in 2024, much of it in construction, and that Egypt had entered the top ten source countries.

Croatia’s Interior Ministry later published permit counts for 1 January through 30 November 2025. Egyptian citizens received 5,149 residence-and-work permits in that window, listed with Nepal, the Philippines, India, and the regional Balkan sources that still dominate the rundown. The 5,149 figure is issuances in eleven months, including new hires, extensions, and seasonal stamps. It is not the same stock Madbouly quoted in Luanda, and both numbers can sit in the same year if older permits were still valid.

THE EGYPT-CROATIA FILE

In February Madbouly set a public aim of more than $1 billion in two-way trade, with a more balanced mix of higher-value goods. The 2023 outturn sat at about a seventh of that target. People had crossed the Adriatic faster than cargo had.

Alexandria and Rijeka Signed Paper, Not Sailings

Nine months before Luanda, the two governments had already written down the maritime fix they were still discussing in Angola. On 18 February 2025, after three bilateral agreements signed in Cairo, Plenković called the port piece a way to tie the Suez Canal to Rijeka, one of the deepest harbors in the northern Adriatic and a bet on Croatia as a transport and energy hub for that part of Europe.

THE THREE CAIRO AGREEMENTS

• Culture programme: An executive programme of cultural cooperation covering 2025 to 2028.
• Investment memo: A memorandum of understanding between Croatia’s Ministry of Economy and Egypt’s General Authority for Investment and Free Zones.
• Port pact: A cooperation agreement between Alexandria and Rijeka on maritime transport, logistics, infrastructure, and technology.

Rear Admiral Ahmed Abdel-Moaty Hawash, chairman of the Alexandria Port Authority, signed with Ivan Jakšić, deputy head of the Port of Rijeka. Hawash said the sides would study joint shipping lines and two-way port investment, form a joint committee, and start technical talks in the following weeks. He said Alexandria handles about 60 percent of Egypt’s imports and exports. Madbouly called Rijeka Croatia’s door to Central and Eastern Europe.

In Luanda he asked for those memos, and the Ro-Ro idea first floated in Davos, to be put to work. Abdelatty repeated the maritime point in the same room. No public sailing schedule between Alexandria and Rijeka surfaced after that request. Rijeka Gateway, a new container terminal at the Croatian port, opened in September 2025 and later said it had handled more than 370,000 TEU in its first year, with more than 1,000 trains, rail taking 53 percent of cargo, and feeders into Italian ports. That growth ran on Asia-Adriatic loops and Central European rail, not on a named Egypt service.

What the Luanda Declaration Put on Paper

The summit’s joint text did not mention Croatia, Alexandria, or Egyptian builders on Adriatic sites. It celebrated a partnership that had deepened since Cairo in 2000, recalled the sixth summit in Brussels on 17 and 18 February 2022, and said the next meeting would be in Brussels. Migration and mobility appeared as a heading, next to trade, investment, and people-to-people ties, without a bilateral labor quota attached.

LUANDA’S PUBLISHED COMMITMENTS

• Global Gateway: Leaders welcomed progress on the Africa-Europe investment package of €150 billion, with von der Leyen saying more than €120 billion had already been mobilised against a 2027 aim.
• Power target: The Africa-Europe green energy initiative is supposed to supply at least 50GW of renewable electricity for 100 million people by 2030.
• Other energy money: A G20 renewables pledge of €15.5 billion, and more than €400 million from Team Europe for clean cooking.
• Peace language: Support for a just peace in Ukraine, the occupied Palestinian territory, Sudan, the DRC, the Sahel, Somalia, and other files, plus a call to fund AU peace operations through assessed UN contributions.

Madbouly’s own speech stayed on the continental register. He restated Africa’s case for a more representative UN Security Council and for financial institutions that move technology and cheaper finance. He tied African security to European security, pointed to Egypt’s work on the Sharm el-Sheikh Gaza ceasefire, condemned abuses in El Fasher in Sudan, and listed Egypt’s tools, from the Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution to the African Space Agency hosted in Cairo.

Those are the sentences a joint declaration can absorb. They are not a Ro-Ro berth and they are not a stay-and-work permit.

Gaza Reconstruction Sat Next to the Trade Ask

Successive crises on our continent have proven that African security is also European security.

Mostafa Madbouly, Prime Minister of Egypt, opening session of the 7th AU-EU Summit in Luanda

In the Croatian meeting he turned that line into an invitation. He set out Egypt’s Gaza position and the effort to carry out the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement with regional and international partners, and he asked Croatia to join a planned conference on early recovery and reconstruction in Gaza. Two days earlier in Johannesburg he had told a G20 session that Egypt was ready to host that conference, after a UN Security Council text on Gaza on 17 November 2025.

Plenković thanked Cairo for the February reception and praised the Grand Egyptian Museum. Croatian President Zoran Milanović, with First Lady Sanja Musić Milanović, had attended the Grand Egyptian Museum opening on 1 November 2025, one of 40 statesmen invited by al-Sisi. The next day in Alexandria he opened “Echoes of Egypt: Sphinxes in Croatia,” a show tied to the anniversary of diplomatic relations. A flautist from the Croatian National Theatre Orchestra in Zagreb played in the museum symphony. Egypt’s minister of Awqaf had also made a first visit to Zagreb, and Madbouly noted a then-planned trip to Cairo by Croatia’s speaker of parliament for a Union for the Mediterranean meeting.

Protocol was busy. Trade was not. Plenković also pointed to calmer Red Sea traffic and a recovery in Suez Canal transits, which is the geography a Rijeka hook-up would use if it ever left the memo.

Seven Official Labor Routes Left Croatia Out

By late September 2026, Egypt’s foreign ministry listed seven programmes to move trained Egyptian workers into seven European countries. The named destinations were Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Romania for organised pathways, and Greece and Cyprus for seasonal farm work. Croatia was not on that list. The same package cited broader 2026 migration papers with France and Britain, and exploratory talks with Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.

The ministry said irregular migration by Egyptians to Europe fell 67 percent in the first half of 2026, and that no smuggling boat had left the Egyptian coast for Europe in a decade. It put migration-related finance agreed with international partners, including the European Union, at $556 million, of which $14 million was tagged for labor mobility into EU countries. That is the official map of where Cairo later chose to brand a pathway. Zagreb’s construction sites and hotels, where Madbouly had already counted thousands of Egyptians, sat outside the branded seven.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The Luanda ask: On 24 November 2025 Madbouly told Plenković to activate the February investment and Alexandria-Rijeka papers and to take more trained Egyptian labor.
• The February texts: Culture, investment, and port agreements were signed in Cairo on 18 February 2025 in front of both prime ministers.
• The labor stock: Madbouly’s November figure was about 7,000 Egyptians working in Croatia; Croatian permit data show 5,149 Egyptian issuances in the first eleven months of 2025.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The Ro-Ro line: No public launch date, operator, or first sailing between Egyptian and Croatian ports has been posted.
• The return visit: Plenković’s invitation for Madbouly to come to Croatia has no published follow-through date.
• A Croatia labor treaty: Talk of a formal recruitment framework, repeated from Davos through Luanda, has not appeared as a signed bilateral labor accord.

The people Madbouly counted in Luanda were already the part of the relationship that did not need a new communique. In September 2026, when Egypt named the seven European labor programmes it had launched, Croatia was not on the list. Rijeka’s new terminal posted its first-year volumes on other routes.