Persona non grata. The French ambassador to Algiers, Stéphane Romatet, would now be considered “undesirable” by the Algerian authorities, reports TV5 Monde, based on an announcement made this Sunday during the program Weekly Show on the Algerian government news channel AL24 News. This decision would have been taken following the participation of Stéphane Romatet in the show Further investigation of France 2 devoted to the diplomatic crisis between Paris and Algiers – which was very poorly received on the other side of the Mediterranean.
In a press release, the Algerian authorities denounced a “tissue of untruths” and mentioned “a real aggression against the Algerian state, its institutions and its symbols”. In Further investigationthe ambassador notably returned to the decision taken by Emmanuel Macron at the end of July 2024 to support the Moroccan proposal for autonomy for Western Sahara. A position which deeply irritated Algiers, historical support of the Polisario Front, an independence movement opposed to Morocco in this disputed territory.
An embassy charge d’affaires summoned
According to an AL24 News columnist, this speech would have led the Algerian authorities to consider the ambassador as “undesirable”without an official notification having been publicly confirmed at this stage. Stéphane Romatet currently heads the embassy from Paris after leaving Algiers at the request of President Emmanuel Macron, against the backdrop of a persistent bilateral crisis since the summer of 2024. A first signal of this new escalation was given with the summoning of Gilles Bourbao, charge d’affaires of the French embassy in Algiers, by the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the broadcast of the same report.
The Algerian channel also announced a reciprocity measure concerning the French journalist Christophe Gleizes, imprisoned in Algeria since June 29 after his sentence to seven years in prison for “apology of terrorism”. His parents would no longer be authorized to visit him due, again according to the same source, to the refusal of the French authorities to authorize the parents of an Algerian consular agent detained in France to do the same.
