2023-11-04 12:30:08
Coming to power six years ago with a new diagnosis and the best intentions of renewing France’s relationship with Africa, Emmanuel Macron is today presiding over a forced military and political withdrawal from the Sahel region in conditions that it is difficult not to consider humiliating. France is expelled from Africa and this eviction signals the failure of a succession of postcolonial policies, including those which intended to break with the anachronistic “Françafrique”.
The series of investigations that The world devoted this week to this rupture illustrates the complexity of the relationship between the former colonial power, which has not completely given up exercising its influence on the African continent, and countries which, despite a growing assertion of their sovereignty, nor do they manage to escape a special relationship with Paris, maintained by a significant migratory flow.
Also read the first part of the series “France-Africa, the rupture”: Article reserved for our subscribers In West Africa, France disowned by public opinion
In Ouagadougou, in 2017, the young President Macron proclaimed his ambition for a completely new approach: “I am from a generation where we don’t come and tell Africa what it should do. » The intention was laudable, even if the head of state could not help telling his African partners what, in his opinion, they should do, giving way to the accusation of an old paternalism in new clothes. The liabilities are too heavy.
Nothing seems to be able to stem the decline of French influence in French-speaking Africa since a succession of coups d’état, in Mali, Burkina Faso then in Niger, led, not without popular support, to the questioning of the link with Paris the political fuel of the military putschists.
Too little, too late
The reasons for African resentment are multiple: the double game of French leaders who, while advocating democracy, appear with autocrats whom they believe to be guarantors of an illusory stability; too security-based management of the fight against jihadism which has prolonged France’s military presence in countries where it should have been a pioneer in terms of development aid; a policy of limiting immigration, general in Europe, which has generated enormous frustration with France; the work of undermining Russian propaganda which encouraged the rise of anti-French sentiment alongside the deployment of Wagner militias on the ground; the personal style of Emmanuel Macron, impatient and willingly brittle, who often clashed with the elites in power; an economic policy that is scattered and not visible enough – too little, too late; the disillusionment of African populations with regard to democratic governance which has not kept its promises.
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