Xavier Driencourt Admits Macron’s Failure To Establish A Stable Relationship With Algeria

The French news magazine “L’Express” broke the calm that had characterized the political and media scenes in France regarding relations with Algeria over the past few weeks, with an interview with the former French ambassador to Algeria, Xavier Driencourt, giving him ample space to attack Algeria again.

The appearances of this retired diplomat, who served as ambassador to Algeria in two phases, in the French media are usually precisely calculated and indicate conflicts within the French state apparatus in managing relations with Algeria, which have not yet regained their relative calm since they were ignited by French President Emmanuel Macron on July 30, 2024, when he decided to change his country’s stance on the Sahrawi issue despite his awareness of the seriousness of his action.

In an article titled: “We only wait for the next crisis,” the former French ambassador to Algeria from 2008 to 2012 and from 2017 to 2020, extensively made provocative statements towards Algeria, simply because it demands rights guaranteed by international legislation, laws, and customs, especially those related to colonialism and its heinous crimes against land, people, and revolutions.

In the interview published on the website of “L’Express” news magazine on the internet, on the evening of Sunday, June 14, Driencourt believes that relations between Algeria and France have entered a recurring cycle of diplomatic crises for years, noting “Paris’s failure to build a stable relationship with Algeria, while historical, political, immigration, and security issues continue to reproduce tension.”

In the view of Xavier Driencourt, known for his extremist right-wing and anti-Algerian stances, decision-makers in Paris often misunderstand the way Algerian authorities operate and their decision-making mechanisms, which explains the recurrence of bilateral crises from time to time, due to stances or decisions announced here or there, as he repeated familiar phrases, such as the Algerian side using the memory issue as a heavy file in the conflict with Paris.

It is known that the retired French diplomat is associated with French political circles that have not yet digested the Algerians’ success in expelling the French occupier with bullets, and his statements are often driven by a desire for revenge against those who knew how to build a sovereign and independent state in its decisions and stances from the former colonizer, a scene that is almost rare among former French colonies, except recently, and specifically in the Sahel region.

Based on what was stated in the interview, the Algerian authorities are “highly sensitive towards France,” which has caused bilateral relations to be damaged by the simplest matters, according to him, and this has also contributed to transforming bilateral relations into a domestic political issue in Algeria, a description that many French officials have contradicted, who also admitted that Paris considers relations with Algeria a French internal affair, and attributed the reason to the millions of Algerian diaspora members residing on French soil.

In the same context, he criticized successive French governments, including those appointed by the current French President, for what he considered “many concessions” by the Élysée Palace to Algeria, noting that everything that has been done in this regard was merely attempts “to reset the relationship,” instead of going deeper and addressing the fundamental causes of the disagreement, while at the same time admitting the failure of all pressures exerted by Paris on Algeria to deter it from its strict positions in building relations based on equality and mutual respect.

Based on his conviction that relations with Algeria are not in Paris’s interest, Xavier Driencourt calls for what he calls “a more realistic and less illusory relationship,” preferring to deal with Algeria based on a balance of interests rather than solely historical or emotional considerations, positions expressed by politicians known for their right-wing and far-right leanings, in both Le Pen’s “National Rally” party and “The Republicans” led by the controversial politician, Bruno Retailleau.