Algeria’s collapse will have serious repercussions on France- French diplomat

Three years after the Hirak, Algeria has become an even more repressive country led by a ruthless military junta which continues to nurture hostility to France as a mantra of the regime, said former French ambassador to Algiers who warns that the ongoing collapse of Algeria will have repercussions on France.

Xavier Driencourt served as French Ambassador to Algiers from 2008 to 2012 and from 2017 to 2020 covering the critical years of the Hirak that ousted Bouteflika.

“New Algeria- according to the appellation in vogue in Algiers- is in the process of collapsing before our eyes and it will trigger the collapse of France in a way that will be stronger and more subtle than the Algerian tragedy which propelled the fall in 1958 of the fourth Republic,” he wrote in an Op-Ed published by Le Figaro.

The post-2019 Algerian regime has thrown members of the Bouteflika circle in jail and used the pandemic to crackdown on dissent, filling jails with peaceful opponents, civil society activists and muzzling independent media.

He gave the recent example of Radio M, the last space of critical reporting left in post-Bouteflika Algeria, which was shutdown with its director Ihsan EL Kadi arrested on charges of “destabilizing” the regime.

The new Algeria which managed to fool France that it is making baby steps to end autocracy is deeply rooted in dictatorship, the former ambassador said, deploring that France is myopic to the oppressive and repressive reality that is pushing millions of Algerians to seek an escape from the country.

That escape could only be to France, where every Algerian family has a member, he said.

As the Algerian regime insists on hostility to France, the French government is making concessions on memory issues while compromising on visas in repentance over the accurate and relevant description of Emmanuel Macron, who in October 2021 did not shy away from describing Algeria as it is as a state whose “official history was rewritten on the basis of hostility to France,” adding that Algeria’s “exhausted political-military system” subsists on “memorial rent.”

But France prefers to turn a blind eye to the oppressive regime that has squandered Algeria’s wealth and created bleak prospects for the country’s youth.

“The price for our blindness and our compromise will result in mass migration,” he warned.