Former French Ambassador Admits The Shortcomings Of His Warped Views Towards Algeria

The French far right has not found a card to play in its attempt to influence the policy of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, towards Algeria, except to get the former French ambassador to Algeria, Xavier Driencourt, to make statements that cast doubt on this rapprochement, in the service of agendas that are not conducive to the rapprochement between Algeria and Paris.
The retired French diplomat, author of the book “The Algerian Enigma”, has made all his media “appearances” through right-wing media, first and foremost “Le Figaro”, which he has used as a platform to insult Algeria on more than one occasion, before moving on to another media outlet linked to the extreme right, “SUD RADIO” (Radio of the South), which takes up the positions expressed by Driencourt, whose background and aims are known in advance, but are not surprising given the positions of the right and the extreme right, who have not yet tasted the military and political defeat of France in the Algerian war of independence.
The former French ambassador, who has since become a source of analysis for the right-wing media on everything to do with Algeria, reviewed some of the positions he had accumulated and expressed on the lost “paradise”. Today, he has come back to consider this statement exaggerated and to deny himself.
The French ambassador, in order to justify his previous statement regarding his claim of the “collapse” of Algeria, started from the “yellow vests” movement in France, which caused a political and security earthquake on the French scene in 2019 and almost led to the overthrow of President Macron’s rule due to the violence that accompanied these events from the police and the protesters.
However, Driencourt lacked the audacity, or rather the courage, to take his hat off to the Algerian youth in the “Hirak” or “popular movement”, which for almost a year did not burn a single tire or shed a single drop of blood in the capital or in the rest of the Algerian cities, while the “yellow vests” movement caused a great deal of damage to private and public property in French cities, shed a great deal of blood and caused a great deal of damage to the French economy.
The French diplomat’s departure from a right-wing angle in analyzing the situation in Algeria weakened his credibility as an expert on Algerian affairs among observers when he spoke of the desire of millions of Algerians to obtain a visa to move to France, ignoring the nature of the relations between the two countries inherited from the colonial era, which led to the settlement of millions of Algerians in France legally and legitimately, and this requires a large movement of people between the two countries because of the social relations between the two shores of the Mediterranean.
The French side had recognized this reality by signing the agreement of 27 December 1968, which gave the Algerians special privileges in France compared with other countries under French occupation, including the other Maghreb peoples, while today they are trying to evade it, which puts the diplomat in the dock for looking with one eye at a thorny issue far beyond his feet.