The French and Algerian presidents were to confirm a “renewed partnership” agreement on Saturday.
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“I will come back to Algiers, after Oran, to salute President Tebboune and the Algerian ministers and sign a” joint declaration for a renewed and ambitious partnership “. We decided yesterday and during the night, because things Do the enthusiasm of the moment, “said Emmanuel Macron, Friday August 26, during a speech delivered to the French community in Algiers. On a visit to Oran, the second city in the country, Saturday August 27, the French president will therefore again make stage in the Algerian capital before returning.
Emmanuel Macron will have met Abdelmadjid Tebboune three times, they exchanged until the end of the night and cultivated their proximity. Never have French and Algerian presidents have been seen so much in such a period of time. A former Algerian diplomat says he has to go back to the 1980s and to the relations between Chadli Bendjedid and François Mitterrand to remember so much good humor.
Straw fire, after so much rapprochement and blurred that punctuate relations between Paris and Algiers, or “new pact turned towards the future and youth”, as Emmanuel Macron hopes?
Diplomatic success
At the end of this visit, which wanted to be “friendship” if not official, the French president can boast of having torn a diplomatic success, however symbolic it may be, at the heart of the night of the night of August 25 and 26, after a dinner with his Algerian counterpart. A “renewed partnership”, he congratulated himself, Friday, after a “wandering” in the European cemetery of Saint-Eugène in Algiers. This place, where time has frozen in the past century, maintains, along the family vaults and the burials of soldiers from the armies of Africa, the memory of one hundred and thirty years of colonization.
In this cemetery inaugurated in 1836, which extends over fifteen hectares and where nearly 135,000 people would be buried, Emmanuel Macron hoped to meditate in the presence of the Grand Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, a first on the soil of independent Algeria, and a highlight announced of its trip. But a few hours before boarding the plane, the latter canceled his visit by declaring that she was tested positive COVVI-19. The French president finally collected himself in the presence of the Ministers of the Economy, Foreign Affairs, Defense and the Interior who accompanied him.
Since his arrival, the Head of State has been trying to put the memorial question at the center of the debates of a visit where difficult, even trashy files, have not been lacking. In addition to memory, also figures the thorny question of visas or the energy supply of Europe at a time when the shortage is watching for its savings.
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