The relationship between Paris and Algiers, subject to cyclical fluctuations, entered a new period of crisis with the decision of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, announced on Wednesday February 8, to recall “for consultation” the Algerian ambassador to France. This bad-tempered gesture responds to the intervention on Monday by the French Embassy in Tunis intended to prevent the Algerian opponent Amira Bouraoui, also holder of a French passport, from being extradited to Algeria from Tunisia where she had entered illegally three days earlier in order to take refuge there.
Thanks to diplomatic assistance from Paris, which obtained authorization from the Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, to let her leave Tunisian territory, the journalist was able to board a flight bound for Lyon. His exile is only one manifestation among many of the intensification of the ongoing repression in Algeria against the residual nuclei of Hirak, the protest movement which had the country in 2019 and 2020, and of which Mme Bouraoui was part of it.
In the eyes of Algiers, the role played by France is a “clandestine and illegal exfiltration of an Algerian national” demanded by the justice of his country, denounces a press release from President Tebboune. For its part, the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “the firm condemnation by Algeria of the violation of national sovereignty by diplomatic, consular and security personnel of the French State”. Sign of the anger that reigns on this subject in Algerian official circles, the daily L’Expression, close to power, castigated ““the barbouzeries” of French diplomacy”.
Form of appeasement
The incident goes against the grain of a rapprochement between the two capitals that began six months ago and which was intended to be spectacular, at least in its diplomatic staging. Emmanuel Macron’s visits to Algiers at the end of August 2022, then that of Elisabeth Borne, six weeks later, accompanied by around fifteen ministers, had solemnized the Head of State’s desire to relaunch a bilateral relationship that had entered into crisis. since his remarks on a “politico-military system” Algerian which would have been built, according to him, on a “memorial pension” and an “hatred of France”. Held in September 2021 at the Elysée Palace in front of young people from families who had experienced the Algerian war, these declarations, which also questioned the existence of “the Algerian nation before French colonization”had provoked the fury of Algiers which had frozen all cooperation with Paris for long months.
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