Irony of political calendars and mysterious agendas. It is at the very moment when the European Parliament recognizes the innocence of Morocco in the affair of the accusations of espionage for the Pegasus software that it draws one of the most violent attacks against the Algerian regime for human rights violations. and attacks on freedom of expression.
For many months, the parliament of Strasbourg, under the influence of groups hostile to Morocco, had tried to pollute its image by formulating against it the worst accusations of espionage targeting Spanish political figures. A strategy carefully thought out in certain circles which had decided to pound the image of Morocco, its international credibility by torpedoing its soft power which was beginning to disturb the established order.
The commission of inquiry of the European parliament on this very sensitive question ended up drawing blanks. No material evidence has come to support these accusations. This demolition enterprise carried out by certain parliamentary groups in Strasbourg has clearly failed, Morocco having always strongly denied its involvement in this type of scandal.
Almost simultaneously, the European Parliament votes a resolution to denounce with the greatest force and the clearest determination the dramatic situation of human rights and freedom of the press in Algeria. Having become an open-air prison, the Algeria of Abdelmadjid Tebboune has become the place where all freedoms die. Journalists are imprisoned for their ideas, human rights activists are either imprisoned or pushed, for the lucky ones, into exile.
This positioning of the European Parliament on the infernal situation of human rights in Algeria is timely. For a long time silent on these tragedies in Algeria, the Parliament of Strasbourg took out the heavy artillery to exert maximum pressure on a regime which believed itself sufficiently protected by certain European circles to consolidate its dictatorship with impunity.
Faced with these developments in the European Parliament on the Maghreb, the two countries, Morocco and Algeria, are expected to turn. Morocco should take the political and media initiative to try to cleanse its image of the smear campaign that had targeted it for many months. He will certainly use this new deal to influence future negotiations between Rabat and the Brussels institutions. Especially since these accusations of espionage have long served as a pretext to justify and fuel the tension between Paris and Rabat.
Today this new deal should logically remove all ambiguities and open the way to a new page in relations between the two countries.
For its part, Algeria will have to respond to this salvo of accusations launched against its regime. With this immediate question, will the visit of the Algerian president to France be maintained in June as it had been announced or will it be a victim of Algerian explosive moods through a new postponement or a simple cancellation? It is common knowledge that relatives of Emmanuel Macron within the Renew group have done everything to block the release and discussion of this resolution on Algeria.
A Mea culpa of the European Parliament on Morocco, even if it is essential, does not seem possible for the moment. These same circles insist on maintaining the sword of Damocles over Morocco by trying to impose on the final text the expression “possible author” which maintains the threat and suspicion.
On the other hand, with regard to Algeria, the hour of truth has come. European parliamentarians demand the release of imprisoned journalists, the most emblematic of which is El Kadi Ihsan, and access to prisons and to trials. Some demands formulated by European parliamentarians are such that to submit to them, it would be necessary to impose an exercise of political openness incompatible with the authoritarianism and despotism of the Algerian military institution. What would the European Union do if Algiers turns a deaf ear to these demands? Between Algeria and the European Union is already simmering a major political crisis caused by the tension between the Algerian regime and Spain.
This shows to what extent relations between the European Parliament and Morocco are on the way to appeasement and why not normalization, while these reports are taking a dangerous slope with Algeria, whose rigidity of the regime can cause all the dead ends and clearing the way for all the dangerous scenarios and the most paralyzing tussles.