Algeria Refused, the Moroccan Regime Submitted to Macron’s Bargaining

The former French ambassador to Algeria twice, Xavier Driencourt, spoke about the bargaining by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, with Algeria and with the Moroccan regime, to side with one of the two countries, and he concluded with the belief that the party that submitted to these bargaining was the Moroccan regime.

As one of those who know the secrets of Algerian-French relations and the most prominent theoretician of the extreme right in France, Xavier Driencourt became a fortune teller in reading the political positions for the media and circles supporting the Alawite Kingdom, so that he became persistent on right-wing media platforms, and the last of these platforms was “Le Point” magazine, to read the recent French decision, supporting the plan for autonomy in Western Sahara, which the Moroccan regime proposed in 2007.

In response to the magazine’s question: “How does this statement by President Macron redefine the current diplomatic dynamics between Morocco and France?”, Xavier Driencourt responded, saying: I think that in Paris, we weighed the advantages and disadvantages, the pros and cons, and we decided that the advantages were more important on the Moroccan side than the disadvantages of a quarrel or a break with Algeria”.

In some detail, the former French ambassador to Algeria added: “I recall that in recent years, since 2017, President Macron had made a lot of gestures for the Algerian side, moreover, Morocco somewhat criticized the President of the Republic (Macron) for these gestures. We made a lot of gestures on the French side and Algeria never responded positively. The president considered, all things considered, that it was better to pierce the abscess somehow and make the gesture expected by Rabat”.

For the retired French diplomat, who was vacationing in the Alawite Kingdom at the time of this dialogue, what French President Emmanuel Macron did “was not a surprise. Several months there was a fairly significant development. Paris has maintained a balance between Algiers and Rabat on the (Western) Sahara issue by stating the UN position. However, we were in an extremely complicated relationship with Morocco, and therefore, I understand that to reconcile with Morocco, at least this is my reading of things, the President of the Republic decided to take a very important step forward on the question of the Moroccanness of Western Sahara”.

It is understood from the words of the French diplomat that Macron did everything necessary to engage in rapprochement with Algeria at the expense of the “historic French protectorate,” the Kingdom of Morocco, but he did not get what he wanted, because Algeria was accustomed to not trading in its principles, positions, and interests. Unlike the Moroccan regime, which can give up what is most precious to it to achieve fleeting and cheap political gains, as it did with the Palestinian issue, which it neglected in exchange for miserable and cheap normalization with the Zionist entity, even as it chairs the so-called “Jerusalem Committee”, which falsity has been exposed.

The Alawite regime in Rabat was also unable to even issue a statement condemning the assassination of the head of the political bureau of the Palestinian resistance movement “Hamas”, Ismael Haniyeh, like the rest of the Arab and Islamic countries and all countries with independent decision-making. In contrast, he calls himself “Emir or Commander of the Faithful” and at the same time received Zionist ships expelled from Spanish ports, loaded with weapons to kill children, women and the elderly of occupied Palestine and devastated Gaza in Moroccan ports, despite the Moroccan people’s rejection of normalization and betrayal.

The French diplomat’s statements reveal that Algeria has not responded to the French bargaining in the way that Paris had hoped or wished for more than seven years (since 2017, as Driencourt said), while the Moroccan regime sold everything to France in less than six months, i.e. since the visit of the French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, to Rabat, in February 2024, where he showed the beginning of a shift in the French position.