Can we be really surprised at the speech held a few days ago by President Tebboune? Nothing new under the Algerian sun, if not the eternal antifrançaise rhetoric whose primary function is to hide a police power, the fruit of an implicit compromise with the Islamists, heir to a Sovietism with oriental sauce. Tebboune the “nomenclaturist” active in satiety The register which legitimizes power in Algeria since 1962: the permanent denunciation of the former colonizer in charge of all the ills of a country whose leaders intoxicate the people with a war of Algeria which 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 themselves. Failing to think about the future, they subject it to a perpetual memorial war project.
The failures of the governments which have followed one another for more than seven decades, the bad economic choices, systemic corruption, the incapacity to democratize the independent nation, continuous Islamization, polymorphic attacks with the most basic public freedoms attest to a reality denied by hierarchs which, as they feel weakened, fear an additional grade in the semantic climb France that they abhor in Algiers but do not hate in Paris as soon as it is a question of acquiring goods, coming to be treated there or sending their children there in its universities.
Antifrançaise outpouring
The Address of the Algerian President is full of all the antifrançais clichés, crystallizing most of the criticisms sedimed for decades by the regime. However, it marks a rise in power in aggressiveness and, ultimatelyin the desire to humiliate French, targeted as an increasingly explicit enemy, the best possible enemy with the Moroccan neighbor. Thus, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, completing his remarks, calls for the construction of a statue of the Emir Abdelkader at the heart of Paris in pledge of the French good will, aiming to undoubtedly complete in his eyes what he considers to be the essential diktat of repentance which he intends to impose on the rulers of France. It is clear that rarely, in its constant aggressiveness, the Algerian power will have gone so far in its vindictive provision. And just as rarely will he have combined with the verbal escalation of acts of hostility exceeding the only stage of speech. Somewhere, Algiers takes action, no longer content with chin strokes.
The arrest and incarceration of Boualem Sansal, a great Franco-Algerian voice, is undeniably part of a fully assumed conflictualization strategy which, since the confinement of the writer, has decided to give in to French demands, whether consular or judicial, flouting without restraint of the principles however fundamental in terms of protection of the human person. It could be, under these conditions, that the hostage taking of which Boualem Sansal is victim is only the inaugural moment of an offensive more generalized, ingesting, decided and pushed by the Algerian authorities. Already, influencers on the networks give voice to threaten the criticism of the regime or attack in terms that are little leading to the supports of our compatriot embastsed, although sick and elderly. In the brief term, community instrumentalization would undoubtedly constitute the natural extension of this deployment, as fearful of certain informed observers of the Franco-Algerian relationship.
Algiers no longer hides his intention to open a front within French society
It is this ecosystem that obviously wanted to mobilize the Algerian leader on the occasion of his intervention on December 30. The violent incise to which he gave himself up against Boualem Sansal had no other vocation than to agitate a scarecrow which he deemed to unkind in a country which, six years ago, in February 2019, demonstrated against Abdelaziz Bouteflika and for the establishment of a second republic. As the Hirak’s sixth anniversary approaches and while Syria saw in a few days collapse a fiftieth dynasty, the Algiers dignitaries index their anti -French radicality on the manifest concern that seizes them, as for the sustainability of their hold on a people who aspires to more freedom and unless inequality.
Threatening speech
This flight forward has found in the degraded relationship with Paris its outlet, reviving a chauvin, a bellicist nationalism, all the more exacerbated as it considers itself betrayed by the French president who had in his time open the Pandora’s box of a France “Culpable of crime against humanity”. Tebboune’s speech is not only a denunciator, it is threatening. And it must be interpreted as such at the time of hybrid conflicts. Algiers no longer hides his intention to open a front within French society. This is the main lesson, and not the least disturbing, that we must draw from this new rise in tension of the Franco-Algerian relationships.
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, are constantly provoking us. Far from the phantasmagors of the Algerian president who deliberately ignores that the great emir he claims to be much more Francophile than him, France could then honor Abdelkader to better dishonor Tebboune and his feudaires.
