“I will return to Algiers, after Oran, to greet President Tebboune and the Algerian ministers and sign a “joint declaration for a renewed and ambitious partnership”. We decided it yesterday and during the night, because things are going well in the enthusiasm of the moment”, welcomed Emmanuel Macron, Friday, August 26, during a speech to the French community in Algiers. Visiting Oran, the country’s second city, on Saturday August 27, the French president will stop in the Algerian capital again before returning.
Emmanuel Macron will have met Abdelmadjid Tebboune three times, they exchanged until the end of the night and cultivated their closeness. Never have French and Algerian presidents seen each other so much in such a short period of time. A former Algerian diplomat says he has to go back to the 1980s and the relations between Chadli Bendjedid and François Mitterrand to remember so much good humor displayed.
Straw fire, after so many rapprochements and estrangements that punctuate relations between Paris and Algiers, or “ new pact turned towards the future and youth”, as Emmanuel Macron hopes?
Diplomatic success
At the end of this visit, which wanted to” friendship “ if not official, the French president can boast of having achieved a diplomatic success, however symbolic, in the middle of the night of August 25 and 26, after a dinner with his Algerian counterpart. A “renewed partnership”, he welcomed, Friday, after a “wandering” in the European cemetery of Saint-Eugene in Algiers. This place, where time stood still in the past century, maintains, along the family vaults and the graves of the soldiers of the armies of Africa, the memory of one hundred and thirty years of colonization.
In this cemetery inaugurated in 1836, which extends over fifteen hectares and where nearly 135,000 people would be buried, Emmanuel Macron hoped to gather in the presence of the Chief Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, a first on the soil of the independent Algeria, and an announced highlight of his trip. But a few hours before boarding the plane, the latter canceled his visit, declaring that he had tested positive for Covid-19. The French president finally gathered in the presence of the ministers of economy, foreign affairs, defense and the interior who accompanied him.
Since his arrival, the Head of State has striven to put the memorial question at the center of the debates of a visit where there is no shortage of difficult, even tricky files. In addition to memory, there is also the thorny issue of visas or energy supplies to Europe at a time when shortages threaten its savings.
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