From escalation to rupture, there is only one step between Paris and Algiers. A step never taken towards this precipice in which French and Algerians have so much to lose. But the interest of the people does not weigh heavily in the face of the political logic which governs this toxic relationship between the largest state in the Maghreb and its former colonial supervision.
At the presidential palace of El Mouradia, on the heights of the White City, the authoritarian rigidity is such, the diplomatic isolation so profound, the power so weakened, that ultranationalist one-upmanship now seems the only path. Against France, of course, “traditional and eternal enemy”, according to the Algerian Minister of Labor in 2021, El Hachemi Djaaboub. It was during the previous bout of fever between the two countries. At that time, Emmanuel Macron did not recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara – which the UN considers to be a non-autonomous territory. The writer Boualem Sansal was a free man. And the cyber henchmen of Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s regime were not yet out of the woods to call for “burning alive, killing and raping on French soil”.
Four years later, the diplomatic crisis is complete. The language of incredible violence. El Hachemi Djaaboub has since left office, but has lost none of his anger. The Boualem Sansal affair? “The visible part of the iceberg of the vast plot hatched by the forces of evil” against Algeria, according to the former minister. Of his fellow novelist, imprisoned since mid-November, the Algerian president speaks as a bastard, “a thief whose identity and father are unknown”. Emmanuel Macron responds that Algeria “dishonors itself” by detaining the 80-year-old intellectual. That it seeks to “humiliate France”, affirms the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau, furious after the aborted expulsion of the tiktoker “Doualemn” (who will be tried on February 24 for “provocation to commit a crime”), declared persona non grata on Algerian territory.
On television sets, our ministers compete with each other with proposals to twist Tebboune’s arm: denounce the 1968 agreements, which facilitate the entry of Algerian nationals into France? Remove the visa exemption granted since 2013 to the Algerian nomenklatura? No, “divorce” for good with Algiers, the far right is loudly demanding, raising day and night the specter of a war of civilization. Blessed bread for the Algerian regime, its best enemy.
.