France was dreaming of escaping the fatality of a "zero-sum game" in North Africa, the dilemma whereby any warming up with Morocco implies a cooling down with Algeria, and vice versa. But after Algiers withdrew its ambassador to France on Tuesday, July 30, a few hours after President Emmanuel Macron's letter to King Mohammed VI on the 25th anniversary of his reign, France's gamble now looks complicated, even if the threshold of irreparability has not yet been crossed. In the letter, Macron told Mohammed VI that France now recognized the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara, dating from 2007, "under Moroccan sovereignty" was the "only basis" for resolving this conflict at the heart of the regional rivalry between Rabat and Algiers.
Until now, Paris has simply considered this prospect, put on the table by Morocco in 2007, to be "a serious and credible basis for discussion," refraining from expressly mentioning "Moroccan sovereignty" in this context. After three years of tensions provoked by an increasingly offensive, even aggressive Morocco – a consequence of the recognition of the "Moroccan sovereignty" of Western Sahara in December 2020 by Donald Trump, then president of the US – France bowed to pressure from Rabat. The stalemate in its relationship with Algeria, where attempts at reconciliation, notably on the subject of remembrance of the Algerian War, supported by Macron have failed to bring the expected results, was a major contributing factor.
The response from Algiers took the form of a "withdrawal" of its ambassador. In the highly coded world of diplomacy, this measure goes beyond a simple "recall for consultation" to which Algeria had already resorted during the two most recent crises, in October 2021 and February 2023. It does not, however, mean the breaking off of diplomatic relations, even if "it refers to the ultimate alert level before outright rupture," the Algerian daily L'Expression carefully clarified. "In 62 years of Algerian-French relations, this is the first time the crisis has reached such a peak," the newspaper added.
Algeria's reaction emphasized the exceptional nature of Macron's announcement of France's new doctrine on Western Sahara. "The current government has taken this step, which no other French government before it had thought it necessary to take, with great lightness and casualness, without clearly measuring all its potential repercussions," the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press release. Algeria considers that the new French position "flouts international legality, takes up the cause of the denial of the Saharawi people's right to self-determination, and distances itself from all the patient and persevering efforts deployed by the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Western Sahara."
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