The time for diplomacy, it seems, is drawing to a close. French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Wednesday announced that his government would be spending up to six weeks re-examining all of the immigration agreements struck between Paris and Algiers since Algeria won its independence from France in 1962. In the coming weeks, he added, the French government would also present Algiers with a list of Algerian nationals living in France that Paris was determined to send back to their home country.
The months-long decline in the two countries’ relationship accelerated sharply last week after an undocumented Algerian national, believed to be suffering from schizophrenia, killed one person and wounded six more in a stabbing spree in the French town of Mulhouse near the German border. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, a member of the right-wing Les Républicains party, said that the man had been under an OQTF (“obligation to leave French territory”) deportation order – but that the Algerian government had repeatedly refused to take him back.
Retailleau has for weeks now accused the Algerian government of trying to “humiliate” France, and Algier’s alleged refusal to work with Paris to allow the deportation of undocumented Algerian nationals living in France has been a core part of his growing list of grievances.
In one high-profile case, 59-year-old cleaner and social influencer Boualem Naman, known as “Doualemn”, who has lived legally in France for 36 years, was arrested and deported to Algeria for allegedly inciting violence against an Algerian activist opposed to that country’s government.
But he was sent back to France the same day his flight landed in Algiers, with the Algerian government insisting he deserved the right to a fair trial in the country he had long called home. The OQTF order was later lifted by a local administrative court – a decision that Retailleau has sworn to appeal.
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Fuel on the fire
The arrest by Algerian authorities last November of Algerian-born writer Boualem Sansal, who was granted French citizenship last year, has also fed the rising fire. Sansal, a major figure in modern francophone literature, is known for his strong stances against both authoritarianism and Islamism.
He has been charged with the terrorism-related offence of “undermining the integrity of national territory”, apparently connected to an interview he gave to a French far-right newspaper saying that swaths of western Algeria rightfully belonged to neighbouring Morocco.
French President Emmanuel Macron last year triggered diplomatic fury during a visit to Morocco when he reversed decades of French government policy by endorsing Rabat’s sovereignty over the contested Western Sahara.
Algiers has long backed Sahrawi independence through its support of the separatist Polisario Front – a stance that Algeria believes is in keeping with the United Nation’s decades-long recognition of the Western Sahara as a territory denied the right to self-governance. Earlier in February, Culture Minister Rachida Dati became the first French official to formally visit the territory.
Yahia Zoubir, non-resident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Qatar, said that it was difficult to see a way out of the worsening crisis between the two countries.
“It’s the worst crisis I remember, and I’m of a certain age,” he said. “You have the son of [former French president Nicholas] Sarkozy saying he would burn down Algerian consulates, and then Rachida Dati going to the Western Sahara. No one seems to want to de-escalate the situation.”
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Although Bayrou stressed on Wednesday that he was not trying to exacerbate tensions between Paris and Algiers, his threat to rethink long-standing treaties between the two countries – including the much-amended 1968 migration pact that has historically made it easier for Algerian nationals to settle in France – echoes the hardline demands that Retailleau has been hammering across French media for weeks.
The political chessboard
Khadija Mohsen-Finan, a political scientist specialising in North Africa’s Maghreb region at Paris Sorbonne-CNRS’s SIRICE research centre, said that the collapsing relationship between the two countries had to be viewed in part through the lens of France’s own political crisis.
The snap legislative elections called by President Emmanuel Macron in June 2024 have left no one party with a majority in parliament, and the so far short-lived coalitions that followed have seen Macron’s followers join forces with the increasingly anti-immigration Les Républicains to form government.
“Since Emmanuel Macron’s dissolution of the National Assembly, part of the political right, part of Les Républicains, have launched themselves into a controversy with Algeria to position themselves on the political chessboard with a view to the 2027 presidential elections,” she said.
“They have basically created an enemy that combines many of the characteristics that the French fear – that is, immigration and insecurity, and the Algerian is going to embody all this at once. But the relationship between France and Algeria is a very old one, dating back to the early 19th century when Algeria was made up of three French departments. And now people are going to reduce it to the question of OQTFs.”
Algeria is far from the only country to drag its heels on deportations. The General Directorate for Foreign Nationals in France, which sits under the interior ministry, announced this week that out of 5,000 or so requests in 2024 by France for Algerian authorities to provide potential deportees with the laissez-passers needed to facilitate their passage back to Algeria, roughly 42 percent had been granted. By contrast, the average number of French applications accepted by other countries the same year sat around 60 percent.
For Mohsen-Finan, the French government’s reaction to the Mulhouse attack showed how much domestic political pressures were driving the responses of Macron and his ministers.
“With the Mulhouse affair, they could have said from the beginning that he was a psychiatric case – there was no need to even mention that he was Algerian,” she said. “For the interior minister, it was manna from heaven, because he embodied everything at once – Algeria’s refusal to take him back, violence and terrorism. Because the president immediately said that it was Islamist terror. So that was very quick, even though the tensions are very high. On the French side, I’m sorry, but we can see that there’s no desire at all to lower those tensions.”
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The question of memory
Although Algeria and France still enjoy significant economic ties – European demand for Algeria’s plentiful natural gas supplies have only become more urgent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the two countries have had a strained relationship since Algeria won its independence after years of brutal fighting. Zoubir said that the history of colonial rule still weighed heavily on Algeria’s collective memory.
“What re-emerges really is the question of memory,” he said. “And within this context, there is also the belief – I’m giving you now the Algerian interpretation – that France never accepted Algeria’s independence. This is something that brings together both the state and the society – that France never accepted that we are now a sovereign nation. And when it’s repeated all the time ad nauseam, as Macron did when he talked about how Algeria was no nation before the French colonised it, that colonisation was a good thing, and so on and so forth, that adds insult to injury.”
As the two countries’ relationship deteriorates, French media has once again become home to a host of debates on the nature of French rule in Algeria. Speaking to French TV station LCI in January, far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen – whose late father, the founder of France’s far-right party then known as the National Front, himself served as a paratrooper in Algeria and has been repeatedly implicated in having committed acts of torture during the war – insisted that French colonisation had been no “drama” for Algerians.
Not everyone in France looks back on the days of French Algeria with such open nostalgia. National media watchdog ARCOM this week opened an investigation into a local radio station after journalist Jean-Michel Aphatie compared the mass killing of civilians by French troops in Algeria to massacres carried out by Nazi troops during France’s own occupation by a foreign power.
Mohsen-Finan said that both countries still carried vastly distant perceptions of this painful history.
“In France, we’ve stopped talking about the Algerian War, colonisation, French settlement and so on,” she said. “And there’s been a blank spot, an absence of history, as [historian Benjamin] Stora puts it, on this issue. So the French think that the Algerians talk too much about it, and that the political and intellectual media space is saturated with the history of the war and colonisation. On the other hand, the Algerians think that the French have drawn a line, or forgotten, about 132 years of war and colonisation. And it was a very painful war for them.”
Zoubir said that this feeling of resentment was only strengthened by the French government’s escalating shows of force against Algerian authorities.
“Whenever there is the issue, or at least the questioning of the sovereignty of Algeria, that becomes bad – especially with Boualem Sansal,” he said “The interpretation [in Algeria] is, ‘What, we don’t have a justice system? You in France, you can do whatever you want, you can judge or not judge. Why is it that we cannot have our own laws?’ So it goes deep.”
Ultimately, Mohsen-Finan said, the threat of a rupture between the two governments would only make life more difficult for the millions of people living in France with ties to both countries.
“It’s clear that we’re seeing a criminalisation of Algerians living in France without documentation,” she said. “But there are a lot of Algerians. You have some who are undocumented, you have some who are living here legally – and that’s the vast majority. So it’s a way of casting an anathema on a country, and of creating an enemy.”
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