The president of Algeria challenges Pedro Sánchez

BarcelonaThe president of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has taken advantage of one of the rare meetings with the country’s press – completely gagged by the “system”, as the state apparatus is called there – to charge again against Pedro Sánchez and its support for Morocco against the self-determination aspirations of the Saharawi people. Tebboune described as a “false step” the turn of Sánchez, who almost a year ago endorsed Rabat’s plan to give autonomy to Western Sahara within Morocco, against what international law and UN resolutions foresee : the celebration of a self-determination referendum of the former Spanish colony. Tebboune went further and described Sánchez’s historic turn as a “hostile act”, not towards the Sahrawis, but towards Algeria itself, and reiterated that his country’s relations with Spain remain “frozen”.

Sánchez’s turn on the Western Sahara (in a letter to Mohamed VI the Spanish president said that the Moroccan plan was “the most serious, realistic and credible” to resolve the conflict inherited from the end of Franco) caused a diplomatic earthquake, with the call for consultations by the Algerian ambassador in Madrid and the suspension of the treaty of friendship and good neighborliness that the two countries had signed a few months before. The bank of Algeria, at the same time, stopped all payments with origin or destination in Spain, which has created problems for many companies. Algiers has not cut off the gas tap, but the doubt is what will happen with the new contracts that are being negotiated, now that all of Europe is looking for alternative sources of supply to Russia.

No problem with the king

Asked about relations with Spain, Tebboune was definitive: “Everything remains the same, the agreement is frozen, but not broken”. And he assured: “Personally, I am deeply saddened by the state of relations with Spain”, especially because, said the president, “it is not Algeria that has unleashed this crisis”.

For Tebboune, “all this has nothing to do with the Spanish people, with whom we have very good relations”. Algiers also has no problem with the King of Spain, “and he knows it”. Algiers, therefore, freezes but does not break, and waits to see what happens in the troubled waters of Spanish politics. If there is a change in the color of the government, maybe things will heat up again with Morocco – which polices the Spanish border, if necessary at the cost of episodes like the Melilla tragedy – and Spain will return to its historic position.

Last week the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Trade invited Spanish companies operating in Algeria, and which have suffered the freezing of relations, to leave the country. Madrid has had the support of Brussels, which considers the sanctions of Algiers unjustified. Algeria has reduced imports from Spain by a third (from 2,906 million euros in 2019 to 1,010 million last year), but, in the opposite direction, exports have grown by almost 85% (from 3,851 to 7,105 million ).

The Algerian authorities have accused the European Union of “confounding the political and commercial dimensions” of the affair and the whole thing will become more complicated when Spain assumes, in June, the rotating presidency of the EU, which it must serve, as it said a few months ago in Barcelona the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, to convene a summit with the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.