Emmanuel Macron will make an official visit to Algeria next week. The trip, from Thursday August 25 to Saturday August 27 to Algiers then Oran, follows a first visit of around twelve hours in December 2017, at the start of his first five-year term. The French president and his Algerian counterpart Abdelmadjid Tebboune discussed this visit during a telephone conversation on Saturday.
This trip comes at the end of a sequence loaded with symbols with the 60th anniversary of the Evian Accords (March 18, 1962), which ended more than seven years of war between Algerian insurgents and the French army, and independence of Algeria (July 5, 1962) after 132 years of French colonization.
Paris and Algiers hope to turn the page on a series of misunderstandings and tensions over the past few months. The relationship with the new French president, the first of the Fifth Republic to be born after the Algerian War, was however announced under the best auspices.
During a trip to Algiers in February 2017, Emmanuel Macron, then candidate for the Élysée, described colonization as a “crime against humanity”, raising hopes of repentance in Algeria as well as strong criticism from the right and of the extreme right in France. Back in Algiers on December 7, 2017, a few months after his election, he called not to remain “hostages” of the past and to build “much more developed relations” between the two countries.
“By choosing Algiers as a destination for the start of his term, President Macron shows that Algeria is returning to the regional and international scene,” notes Hasni Abidi, director of the Center for Studies and Research on the World. Arab and Mediterranean in Geneva, quoted by AFP. “Algeria cannot ignore a good agreement with Paris either,” he believes, pointing out in particular the importance of the Western Sahara issue in the eyes of the Algerians in the face of their Moroccan neighbor.
The former French ambassador to Algeria Xavier Driencourt, on the other hand, does not see “the interest of such a visit at present”. “There is no recent change in relations with Algeria,” he observes. “There would still have to be gestures from Algiers on a certain number of our requests, which are consular passes, economic affairs,” he says.