How Do French Right-Wing Parties Push Macron to Destroy Relations With Algeria?

Critics in Parisian and Moroccan salons of the rapprochement between Algeria and France raise the slogan of establishing balanced relations between France and the Kingdom of Morocco, but in the last few weeks, they have been ferociously attacking President Emmanuel Macron and asking him to follow what the Rabat regime demands.

With the recent return of diplomatic communication between Algeria and Paris, diplomatic noise rose in the salons supporting the restoration of traditional relations with Rabat, and among those who re-raised this slogan was the former ambassador to Algeria twice, Xavier Driencourt, who does not miss any opportunity to attack the president of his country, because of his desperate eagerness to correct relations with Algeria, and his ignoring of the “pleading” expressions issued by the right-wing lobbies, calling for pardon for the scandal of spying on his phone and phones of his senior ministers, in what was known as the “Pegasus” affair.

The author of the book “The Algerian Mystery” talks about the balance in his country’s relations with Algeria and with the Kingdom of Morocco “during the eras of Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy, and even Hollande… However, this balance has disappeared since the election of Emmanuel Macron. We have focused entirely on Algeria.”

For the French diplomat, “This bet is turning into a trap. In reality, we are only receiving insults from Algeria, and we have disagreed with Morocco, which is asking France to recognize its sovereignty over Western Sahara, as Spain did.”

Xavier Driencourt, like other defenders of the interests of the Moroccan regime and the establishment of strong relations with it, adopts a strange approach to balancing his country’s diplomatic relations with both Algeria and the Kingdom of Morocco, during the era of former French presidents such as François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, and Nicolas Sarkozy. He knows that all these presidents failed to establish balanced relations with the two Maghreb countries.

France, during the era of former President Jacques Chirac, for example, is considered the real and actual incubator of the idea of the autonomy project that the Moroccan regime is promoting today, and France, during the era of his successor, President Nicolas Sarkozy, is the one that embraced, supported, and strongly defended this project rejected by the Sahrawis, the African Union, and many others. It is one of the countries in the world that defends the violated rights of peoples, and the evidence for this is that the Moroccan regime deposited an autonomy plan in the United Nations in 2007, during the first year of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s term, who strongly defended this project, which without France that has the right to veto, it was not able to persist for so long in the corridors of the United Nations.

Accordingly, the balance that the former French ambassador talks about in Paris’s relations with the two Maghreb countries remains a balance in a unique sense that only exists in the imagination of this diplomat, who appears to have developed dementia as he grows older. He realizes that Emmanuel Macron’s support for the Moroccan autonomy plan in Western Sahara means a blatant bias in favour of the Moroccan regime, and this refers to the situation of Algerian-French relations and what Algerian-Spanish relations are experiencing these days, which have entered a dark tunnel since the outgoing Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, dared to change Madrid’s historical position on the Sahrawi issue.

Xavier Driencourt realizes that the Sahrawi issue is considered a sensitive file for Algeria as it is related to national security, and therefore if France decided to support the autonomy plan, this means that it targeted Algeria’s national security in one way or another, and this is enough to destroy relations with Paris, and perhaps it is a “trap” that the lobbies supporting the Moroccan regime in the French state want to install for President Macron to push him out of the “balance” that currently exists, that is, keeping Paris at the same distance from the two Maghreb capitals, into the quagmire of “imbalance” by supporting the Moroccan plan in Western Sahara, and then it will be difficult to rebuild what has been destroyed. As is the case today between Algeria and Madrid.