Can we really be surprised by the speech given a few days ago by President Tebboune? Nothing new under the Algerian sun, except the endless anti-French rhetoric whose primary function is to mask police power, the fruit of an implicit compromise with the Islamists, heir to a Sovietism embellished with oriental sauce. Tebboune the “nomenclaturist” activates to his satisfaction the register which legitimizes power in Algeria since 1962: the permanent denunciation of the former colonizer responsible for all the ills of a country whose leaders intoxicate the people with a war of Algeria that would never end. And for good reason: the past war is the best agent of a permanent war to which they contribute to better maintain their position. Failing to think about the future, they subject it to a project of perpetual memorial war.
The failures of governments which have succeeded one another for more than seven decades, the bad economic choices, the systemic corruption, the inability to democratize the independent nation, the continued Islamization, the polymorphous attacks on the most elementary public freedoms attest to a a reality denied by hierarchs who, as they feel weakened, take an additional step in the semantic escalation aimed at a France that they abhor in Algiers but do not hate in Paris from when it comes to acquiring goods there, coming for treatment or sending their children to its universities.
Anti-French escalation
The Algerian president's address is full of all the anti-French clichés, crystallizing most of the criticisms sedimented for decades by the regime. However, it marks a rise in aggressiveness and, in finein the desire to humiliate the French, targeted as an increasingly explicit enemy, the best possible enemy with the Moroccan neighbor undoubtedly. Thus, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, finishing his remarks, calls for the construction of a statue of Emir Abdelkader in the heart of Paris as a token of French goodwill, undoubtedly aiming to complete in his eyes what he considers to be the essential diktat of repentance that he intends to impose on the rulers of France. It is clear that rarely, in its constant aggressiveness, has the Algerian government gone so far in its vindictive disposition. And just as rarely will he have combined verbal escalation with acts of hostility going beyond the mere stage of speech. Somewhere, Alger takes action, no longer content with chin shots.
The arrest and incarceration of Boualem Sansal, a great Franco-Algerian voice, is undeniably part of a strategy of fully assumed conflict which, since the writer's confinement, has decided not to give in to French demands, whether They are consular or judicial, without restraint flouting fundamental principles regarding the protection of the human person. It could be, in these conditions, that the hostage-taking of which Boualem Sansal is a victim is only the inaugural moment of a more generalized, meddling offensive, decided and pushed by the Algerian authorities. Already, influencers on the networks are speaking out to threaten critics of the regime or attack in unkind terms the support of our embattled compatriot, although sick and elderly. In the short term, community exploitation would undoubtedly constitute the natural extension of this deployment, as feared by some informed observers of the Franco-Algerian relationship.
Algiers no longer hides its intention to open a front within French society itself
It is this ecosystem that the Algerian leader clearly wanted to mobilize during his intervention on December 30. The violent incise to which he indulged against Boualem Sansal had no other purpose than to raise a scarecrow that he considers unifying in a country which, six years ago, in February 2019, demonstrated against Abdelaziz Bouteflika and for the establishment of a second Republic. As the sixth anniversary of Hirak approaches and while Syria saw the collapse of a fifty-year-old dynasty in a few days, the dignitaries of Algiers index their anti-French radicalism on the obvious concern that seizes them, as to the sustainability of their control over a people who aspire to more freedom and less inequality.
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Threatening speech
This headlong rush found its outlet in the degraded relationship with Paris, reviving a chauvinistic, warlike nationalism, all the more exacerbated as it considers itself betrayed by the French president who in his time had opened Pandora's box of a France “guilty of crimes against humanity”. Tebboune's speech is not only denunciatory, it is threatening. And it must be interpreted as such in times of hybrid conflicts. Algiers no longer hides its intention to open a front within French society. This is the main lesson, and not the least worrying, that we must draw from this new rise in tension in Franco-Algerian relations.
The trap would be to refuse to see it, and not to respond to it, by putting an end once and for all to the complacent reserve with which we welcome the actions which, on the other side of the Mediterranean, never cease to bother us. to provoke. Far from the fantasies of the Algerian president who deliberately ignores that the great emir he claims to be was much more Francophile than him, France could then honor Abdelkader to better dishonor Tebboune and his feudatories.
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