Emmanuel Macron will hold talks with Donald Trump on Monday at which the President of France will attempt to ‘make Europe’s voice heard’. Still seething about being excluded from America’s peace negotiations with Russia, Macron wants to reassert the continent’s authority Stateside.
It will be a forlorn exercise. One of the reasons America – not just Trump’s administration but the one that preceded it – no longer attaches much importance to the EU is because they can see how weak it’s become.
The world understands that Macron talks the talk but never walks the walk
It’s timidity towards Algeria is a prime example. On Saturday, an Algerian man was arrested by police after allegedly running amok with a knife in the French city of Mulhouse. As he stabbed several people, fatally wounding a 69-year-old Portuguese man, the assailant reportedly screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’. Macron said later that there was ‘no doubt it was an Islamist terrorist attack’.
It subsequently emerged that the alleged perpetrator was on a terrorist watchlist after calling for a Jihad in France against the ‘unbelievers’. He had been served with a deportation order, but on the ten occasions that the French authorities had requested co-operation from their Algerian counterparts they had been rebuffed.
‘This is an individual who should have been accepted by Algeria, and Algeria refused,’ said Bruno Retailleau, the Minister of the Interior, in a television interview on Saturday evening. ‘I think we need to change gear with Algeria…we need to establish a balance of power.’
Many in France have been calling for such a gear change for a while. As I wrote in the summer of 2023, what exactly was Algeria’s role in the riots that erupted across France in June that year? The government and the media appeared to stoke discontent among the Algerian diaspora following the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old French Algerian driving a stolen car. It was also alleged that Algerian intelligence services were active on social media, fomenting anger among their compatriots in France.
Relations have been deteriorating ever since. In November last year, Algeria arrested the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal when he arrived in the country from France. His ‘crime’ was to have made critical remarks of Islam and the Algerian regime. Sansal’s health is failing but there is no urgency from France to secure his release.
Paris is similarly weak in its response to Algeria’s refusal to accept its deported citizens. Among the 18,000 foreign nationals in French prisons, 4,000 are Algerians, the biggest representation of any country. Deporting these criminals is, according to a French prefect last year, ‘always complicated’, because of Algeria’s unwillingness to cooperate. Last month, France expelled an Algerian social media influencer for inflammatory messages he had posted, but as soon as he landed in Algiers he was sent straight back to Paris.
In the face of this humiliation, France could have flexed its muscles and implemented a series of punitive measures. They could have frozen the assets of the Algerian regime in France, or banned the elite from coming to Paris for medical treatment, as is their wont, along with not settling their hospital bills. One imagines that is what Trump would have done if a country had treated America with such contempt. France did nothing, underlying how the Republic’s global image has weakened under Macron. The world understands that this is a president who talks the talk but never walks the walk.
The same applies to the EU. On 23 January, the European Parliament adopted a strong resolution in defence of Boualem Sansal. A motion demanding his release was passed by 533 votes to 24 with only a handful of far-left MPs demurring. But it was a meaningless vote because the EU Commission is as reluctant to confront Algeria as Macron is.
The EU and Algeria signed an agreement in 2002 which encompasses ‘all areas’, and pledged to establish an ‘economic prosperity that upholds democratic values and human rights’. The incarceration of Sansal was not the only source of concern for the European Parliament though. The Algerian regime has shut down 47 protestant churches in recent years. Furthermore, in a report last year, the EU noted eight violations by Algeria of the trade agreement signed in 2002.
There will be more: the Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, knows how badly Paris and Brussels need his country’s gas now that Russia is persona non grata in Europe. In her State of the Union address in September 2022, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, characterised Algeria as a trusted energy supplier, and the following year Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy visited Algiers. Overlooking the fact that Algeria had maintained close links with Russia, Borrel remarked that ‘90 per cent of Algerian gas exports go to Europe, and we know we can count on Algeria, which is a reliable partner’.
This is why Boualem Sansal remains in prison; this is why France can’t deport Algerians who commit crimes and this is why Trump won’t listen to Macron. If France and Europe are too weak to stand up to Algeria then they don’t deserve a place at Trump’s negotiating table.
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