There is Brussels, gray and bureaucratic, and there is reality — multicolored and often messy. Rarely do the two match up, and the latest lovefest between the EU and an African country is testament to that.

The chief actors in this new bit of political theater are the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The protagonists are the thousands of refugees who have already started pushing off from North African shores to get to Europe.

The only problem is that Europe doesn’t want them and is putting its money where its mouth is. On Sunday Ms. von der Leyen announced the EU’s $8 billion aid package to Egypt amid mounting concerns that economic pressure and conflicts in neighboring countries could open the spigot on a new flow of refugees across the Mediterranean to economically underperforming European countries.

Significantly, Ms. von der Leyen was joined at Cairo by the leaders of Belgium, Italy, Austria, Cyprus, and Greece. Neither the rich photo opportunities nor the money, though, will be enough to avert a refugee crisis that has been long in coming. According to the European Commission, the new Joint Declaration aims to promote “democracy, fundamental freedoms, human rights, and gender equality.”

All are tall orders for Egypt, a country whose record on human rights isn’t exactly squeaky clean and where last year’s election that saw Mr. el-Sisi secure a third term with 90 percent of the vote was widely seen as rigged. The agreement also hits on expanded cooperation in renewable energy. Little of that, though, is what the billions of dollars in aid are all about. 

The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said as much. Following the signing ceremony, he stated, “We also had the opportunity to discuss issues related to migration in light of the current geopolitical challenges in the Middle East and North Africa. We commend Egypt and its efforts to prevent migration flows from reaching the Mediterranean route, accommodating huge numbers of migrants and limiting illegal trafficking routes.” 

He added: “We have discussed that we must prevent the opening of new routes and we will work very closely with Egypt to ensure that this goal is achieved.” How that will be achieved, considering the logistical impossibility of monitoring with any great precision a largely unpatrolled African coast and a vast stretch of open sea, is unclear. 

Looming in the background, as the presence of Prime Minister Meloni attested, is Italy’s ongoing migrant crisis. Last year, over the course of four days alone, more than 11,000 asylum seekers swamped the tiny island of Lampedusa. Most of those migrants had set off from Tunisia, despite the fact that well before the  unprecedented influx Ms. von der Leyen played a stabilizing role, an  important one for an entire region that is on fire, but also for the control of migration flows.

Ms. von der Leyen  and Ms. Meloni had inked a so-called strategic partnership with Tunis in a bid to put the brakes on illegal boat crossings. Little did that appear to achieve, save for a fleeting publicity coup and another shiny photo opp for Europe’s top bureaucrat. 

There is renewed urgency. Lampedusa may have receded from the headlines, but now enters Crete, the fifth-largest island in the Mediterranean. According to the Greek ministry of migration and asylum, in the last quarter around 1,500 refugees arrived on the island.

The number may not be huge, but it appears to be the start of a trend. Last week, 91 refugees turned up on the tiny Greek island of Gavdos in a single day, overwhelming local administrative resources. Gavdos is due south of Crete — and the Egyptian littoral is due south of Gavdos, across the small Libyan Sea. The deputy regional governor of Heraklion, Crete’s largest city, told Greek television news ERT that the asylum-seekers “have turned our island into a gateway.”

Greece’s immigration minister, Dimitris Kairidis, told ERT that 

“Greece’s borders are Europe’s borders.” He added that the boats arriving at Crete came from eastern Libya. Separately, he averred that “there is a problem with Egypt, there is no doubt. It is the most important country in the Middle East, the most populous in the Arab world, with 110 million people. It hosts nine million refugees and has traditionally played the stabilizing role, an important one for a region which is on fire, but also for the control of migration flows.”

In other words, while the Egyptian coast has not, as an AP report on the EU-Cairo declaration noted, been “a major launching pad for people smugglers and human traffickers sending overcrowded boats across the Mediterranean to Europe,” that could change fast. There is pressure coming from Gaza but also from Sudan, where civil war has already displaced more than seven million people. The easiest place for them to go is across the border to Egypt. 

According to Greek press reports, some of the refugees who made it to Crete and were interviewed by authorities claimed that there are already some 20,000 people “on the African coast” waiting to jump into small boats managed by people smugglers in the hope of getting to Crete in one piece. Whatever the actual number is, figure that it will grow as the weather improves and as the seas calm — regardless of how much money Brussels showers on Cairo.