How the Tunisia of Kaïs Saïed was vassalized by Algeria

Kiosk360. The welcome given recently to the leader of the Polisario by the Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, is a departure from Tunisia’s traditional neutrality in the Sahara issue. The fault is petrodollars, granted sparingly by the Algerian regime, explains an article in the daily Le Monde from which this press review is taken.

In an article published on its site this Thursday, September 15, 2022, under the title “The shadow cast by Algeria on a weakened Tunisia”, the French daily “Le Monde” returns to the diplomatic crisis which broke out in broad daylight between Rabat and Tunis, following the unexpected welcome given by the Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, to the leader of the Polisario separatists, Brahim Ghali, during the recent TICAD 8, or Japanese-African summit, held in Tunis on August 26th.

This “diplomatic crisis between Rabat and Tunis”, writes the French newspaper, “feeds on the growing influence of Algiers on its small eastern neighbor in virtual financial bankruptcy”. Everything is said: the Algerian regime is taking full advantage of the economic crisis raging in Tunisia, coupled with a hopeless political crisis, to buy it its new position on the Sahara issue, even if it means creating a new crack in the fragile edifice. Maghrebian.

Moroccan anger once morest the Tunisian president “is destined to last, casting a shadow over the strategic balance of a Maghreb whose stability has already been weakened by the Algerian-Moroccan divide”, explains “Le Monde”, since the Tunisian president, in the eyes of Rabat, crossed “the red line of diplomatic propriety by granting a welcome worthy of a head of state” to Benbatouche, the leader of the Polisario separatists.

“Le Monde” adds that this protocol error is described as a “hostile and prejudicial attitude” by Rabat, which immediately recalled its ambassador to Tunis, while the free trade agreement which has linked the two Maghreb countries for almost a quarter of century, and which benefits Tunisia much more than Morocco, risks being suspended.

The time is therefore not for appeasement, because Morocco is now convinced, since the arrival of Kaïs Saïed in power in 2019, that “Tunisia has clearly lost its sovereignty in terms of foreign policy… It is clear that the Algerian regime now dictates its will to him, at least on the Sahara file”, explains a Moroccan expert in military strategy, quoted by “Le Monde”.

Kaïs Saïed’s attitude is all the more inexplicable as relations between Morocco and Tunisia have never experienced the slightest hitch since their independence in 1956.

“Le Monde” recalls the episode of Gafsa in 1980 when Morocco came to the rescue of Habib Bourguiba whom the Algerian and Libyan regimes tried to overthrow. The newspaper adds that in “2014, as concern mounted over the fragility of post-revolutionary Tunisia, King Mohammed VI walked the streets of Tunis in a gesture aimed at reassuring the country’s stability… The Covid-19 crisis brought the two states closer together once more, Rabat providing Tunisians with a field hospital in July 2021.

But the new Tunisian president will have a short memory by already committing, in October 2021, an unfriendly gesture towards Morocco. He granted, writes the French newspaper, “a nice diplomatic gift to Algiers by abstaining in October 2021 – alongside the Russians – during the vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution relating to Western Sahara, whose wording was judged by the Algerians as very favorable to Morocco.

The Tunisian head of state, whose country is “on the verge of financial bankruptcy, ended up acceding to certain requests from Algeria”, which paid him in return for his abstention from the UN with “a loan of $300 million. This “permeability of Tunis to Algerian injunctions” has become all the more clear, explains “Le Monde” that the Algerian regime has “continued to activate two means of pressure in order to secure the Tunisian lock. First, the Algerian gas weapon from which Tunisia derives 99% of its electricity. And, secondly, the closing of the border, heavily penalizing the Tunisian economy, in particular the tourist sector”.

By going to Algiers to attend its neighbor’s independence day and by receiving Brahim Ghali in Tunis, “it is not impossible that Mr. Saïed sought to be pleasant in the eyes of Algiers”, declares a former diplomat Tunisian to the newspaper. But this relative benevolence of the Algerian “big brother” “is not without impact on the sovereignty of Tunisia”, negatively of course, concludes “Le Monde”.