How US Ambassador unintentionally embarrassed Algeria’s President Tebboune
US ambassador to Algiers Elizabeth Moore Aubin has been tweeting non-stop about her trips to different regions or Wilayas in Algeria, visiting in total no less than 22 in contrast to the country’s president Abdelmedjid Tebboune who prefers to stay in his Mouradia palace while waiting for foreign visits to be approved by Paris and Moscow.
Tebboune’s only trip at home was to Oran in June last year to kick-off the Mediterranean games. He was seen off by Algeria’s kingmaker and chief of Staff Chengriha at an airport in Algiers and received by another senior army official in Oran.
This led many observers to say the president is imprisoned in the AL Mouradia palace, confirming his status as a civilian puppet of a military junta that holds a firm grip on the state apparatus.
However, Tebboune and his military masters are desperate for foreign recognition seeking global attention from show visits to foreign capitals from which they often return empty handed.
Lacking legitimacy at home, Tebboune is also increasingly perceived abroad as a servant of the army and a spokesman for its erratic and self-defeating decisions and positions, including stoking tension with Morocco and economic retaliatory decisions against Spain.
The Chengriha-Tebboune couple conspired against a youthful people that demanded a clean break with the junta that ruled the country since independence, squandering its oil wealth.
Together with the crackdown on dissidents, Algeria chose a set of distraction tactics that pin all Algeria’s social, economic, and political problems on Morocco and to a lesser extent on France and Israel.
As Algeria craves foreign recognition, it has only achieved the opposite by demonizing its neighbor, using anti-semitic rhetoric and replaying the same old victimization chord which President Macron eloquently described as “memorial rent.”
Algeria, with an oil and gas dependent economy and double-digit inflation and unemployment, cannot project power abroad while its President stays hostage in his palace as the Algerian youth continue to risk their lives at sea.
