This March 22, 2023, Xavier Driencourt, former French ambassador to Algeria (from 2008 to 2012 and from 2017 to 2020), is meeting at the Les Princes restaurant, Porte de Saint-Cloud, in Paris. Mehdi Ghezzar, columnist for Big Mouths of RMC, asked to see him, says the diplomat. According to his account, he assures him that he is an “anti-system, an anti-Tebboune”, the Algerian president, and wants to run in the presidential election of 2024. To do this, he seeks Driencourt’s advice, asks him if he could make him encounter opponents in France. On May 9, 2023, new interview in France, this time in the presence of journalist Abdou Semmar, opposition figure, sentenced to death in Algeria. Despite the testimonies of these two guests to L’Express, and the written records of these meetings, Mehdi Ghezzar today denies having ever met Driencourt and Semmar.
Should we be surprised? This 39-year-old entrepreneur has since become one of the main relays of influence for Algerian power in France. L’Express can confirm that Mehdi Ghezzar met, on January 17, and at his request, Louis-Xavier Thirode, the deputy chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior, after requesting an interview with Bruno Retailleau. He assured that he had elements to transmit about Boualem Sansal, such as these missi dominici which reestablish contact in the event of a diplomatic crisis. “He is today close to President Tebboune,” says an executive advisor at the heart of these issues. According to our information, he is followed by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) because of his Algerian connections at the highest level.
“DZ Lobby”
Mehdi Ghezzar, however, is not one of those good-office gentlemen accustomed to acting discreetly on the fringes of diplomatic channels. Loud, confrontational, virulent, this owner of around ten companies in France makes noise wherever he goes, with this high-minded verb that he has made his mark on. On November 28, in the context of an escalation of tension between Paris and Algiers, he dined alongside around twenty influencers linked to Algeria at the Majouja restaurant, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. “We are facing a media and political war, it will get worse and worse as the months go by. We must be united, indivisible, like the great and beautiful Algeria,” he spoke, a pot of dough to Algerian spread El Mordjene, banned in the European Union, placed in front of him. At least three videos taken live by influencers show him perched as table president, escorted to his right by two standing men in black. They did not introduce themselves and none of the guests knew them, a guest of that evening assured us. The videos of this moment have since all been deleted from social networks by their authors.
Already on September 1, on TikTok, he urged Franco-Algerian influencers to behave like “mujahidin 2.0”. “Abdelmadjid Tebboune is a mujahid in his own way, because he fought what had to be fought,” he added. During this period, he was appointed campaign director in Paris for the Algerian president, then a candidate for re-election. We then saw him on the best terms with the leaders of the embassy in France; he now appears regularly on the Algerian public channel Al24 News. On October 1, 2024, three weeks after Tebboune’s re-election, he again announced to the Arab News media that he wanted to create a “DZ lobby”, meaning Algerian, in France. Since the time he launched his first French real estate business in 2014, soon followed by investments in catering or a car garage, the man has made a breakthrough. “Mehdi Ghezzar is someone that no one had ever heard of until four years ago in Algeria. He came out of nowhere. That raises a lot of questions,” says activist Chawki Benzehra, political refugee. In France.
After football
It all started for him with a chance interaction, a sort of meeting at Nothing Hill in the French media version. One evening in August 2021, Alain Marschall, the co-presenter of Big Mouths on RMC, dinner with a friend at the Princes. Mehdi Ghezzar also, at the next table. He approaches the host, mentions his wife, also a journalist. The current is flowing. At the end of the evening, Ghezzar offers his meal to Alain Marschall. “I was embarrassed but he didn’t want to hear anything,” the “GG” pillar laughs today. He never stopped chatting, telling me about his daily life as a business manager, about the bosses who invest, who work all year round… I told myself that we had a potential big mouth.”
A few days later, Mehdi Ghezzar gave a try to the “GG”, he immediately imposed his character as a bantering boss, who likes to work and complains about the charges. Off camera, the man is also appreciated. “I remember a warm person who integrated quickly,” recalls Joëlle Dago-Serry, GG columnist. Helpful, Ghezzar offers his services to the teams, brings the croissants. The show’s end-of-year meal takes place in one of its restaurants.
He knows how to make himself indispensable, as in September 2023, during a trip to Algeria from After Football, the emblematic RMC show. “We organized our arrival in Algiers, but everything was very complicated, including obtaining visas,” recalls Daniel Riolo, columnist for the show. The journalist asks Ghezzar for advice. “Everything came together quickly when he got involved,” he says. “We found him at the airport and he became the organizer of the trip. He took care of everything from A to Z.” The team marvels at the talents of this improvised GO, who “never talks about internal politics” and with whom “everything is easy in Algiers”, summarizes Riolo.
“Consensus”
At the end of 2023, Mehdi Ghezzar obtains new recognition. On December 12, he was elected “GG of the year”, that is to say best columnist, by the listeners. “I remember that he was obsessed with this GG of the year prize. He kept agitating the social networks to win,” laughs Barbara Lefebvre, columnist of the show, who remembers it at the time as “like a big child”, “warm and endearing”. “From there, I have the impression that it went to his head. He perhaps thought he was untouchable,” wonders Lefebvre.
Ghezzar soon begins a second collaboration, this time on the other side of the Mediterranean. In the summer of 2024, he became a consultant for the Algerian public news channel AL24 News. In their Weekly Show, the entrepreneur takes over the recipes of the GG, but from now on, his diatribes praise the greatness of Algeria, the merits of President Tebboune, while his critics are crushed. To the point of excessive excess. On August 25, he assured that the Moroccan kingdom was “remotely guided by a Zionist regime”. “It is a country that feeds itself with Zionist flies from continuous disinformation through social networks, the Internet, press units,” he asserts. In France, these comments caused him to be ousted from RMC. Ghezzar, sheepish, only publicly apologizes to the hosts. “We couldn’t believe it, remembers Olivier Truchot, co-presenter of the show. I tried to think back to his interventions with us, but nothing suggested that he had a political goal. He was a boy very nice.”
Three days later, Mehdi Ghezzar took the stage of a pro-Tebboune meeting in Paris, in the 14th arrondissement. The former GG of the year is presented as the Algerian president’s campaign director in Paris. In November, he told the media LeLien that he felt “a feeling of honor” when Tebboune “gave him the privilege of organizing this meeting in his name.” Today, Ghezzar is much more mysterious about the behind the scenes of his appointment. “I was in a list of 50 people, my name emerged among around fifteen others, I reached consensus,” he relates.
Coax and intimidate
Conversing with Mehdi Ghezzar can quickly make you dizzy. During the interview he gives us at the Les Princes restaurant – obviously – the entrepreneur-polemicist, long black coat and cigarette at his fingertips, multiplies assertions, sometimes contradictory. Oscillating between a coaxing subtext and a touch of intimidation. Previously, on the phone, he assured us that he knew Alain Weill, the owner of L’Express, but this time, that is no longer the case. He also tells us to give us a favor because he will now only discuss with us – we will realize that he has responded to another newspaper in the meantime.
Without ever losing his confidence, he spontaneously lists his famous acquaintances, telling us three times that he is nicknamed “the Algerian golden boy”, while specifying with relative subtlety that “it’s no matter What”. He also insists on showing us his bank statements live; the ultimate proof according to him of his probity. Only the mention of his parents, of whom he spoke recently on television, inspires him with embarrassment. “My father was a diplomat,” he said, declining to give his name. “He had several functions: consul, consul general, charge d’affaires. In Switzerland, the United States, the Czech Republic, Benin,” he says. On Algerian television, Ghezzar assured that his father had been “close” to Houari Boumediene, president and icon of the war of independence. “It was more than forty-five years ago,” he evacuates this time. His mother, a housewife, raised him with his three brothers and sisters. All of them lived in France from 1990. Mehdi is the only one of the four not to have acquired French nationality – “because of administrative phobia”, he slips.
A “cabal”
He now refuses to speak on the merits of the Sansal case, which he claims “to have the humility not to know”. In mid-December, on the plateau ofWeekly Show from Al24 News, he nevertheless accused Boualem Sansal and Kamel Daoud of being “agents for the destabilization of Algeria, who are paid by people nostalgic for French Algeria”. Which Ghezzar to believe? And above all, what credibility can be given to it? The French executive itself seems to be asking the question. “We are very wary of it,” assures a government source, who does not hesitate, despite its proximity to the Algerian presidency, to draw a parallel, “relatively speaking, with Ziad Takieddine”. This sulphurous intermediary became a master, in the 1990s and 2000s, in this subtle art of making people believe in their importance to make themselves truly essential.
In private, Mehdi Ghezzar strongly asserts that he is the victim of a media “cabal”. Those responsible? “The former members of the OAS,” he slips very seriously to his friends, in reference to this far-right terrorist organization nostalgic for colonization, self-dissolved at the end of the 1960s. A resurgence which would in fact make of the entrepreneur a true “mujahid 2.0”.
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