The Israeli turn on the Moroccan Sahara is anything but a trivial event. It participates, like the Spanish and German turn, in rewriting a new political geography in the region. For countries that are still resisting Moroccan persuasion, it is an additional element of pressure, questioning and questioning.
In direct line of sight of this acceleration of the history in the relations between Morocco and Israel two countries extremely close to the file of the Sahara, Algeria and France. One openly hostile, the other slyly hesitant. It is almost a given that these two countries are the last to applaud these performances and this new Moroccan dynamic on a decades-old regional crisis.
The Algerian regime first. His reactions and his attitudes have already subscribed him to a sort of political autism in this matter. For Algiers, all these developments on the Sahara affair are null and non-existent. Isn’t he still clinging to the impossible obsession of seeing Joe Biden’s Democratic administration proceed to invalidate Republican Donald Trump’s choices on the Sahara? Doesn’t he cultivate the deaf certainty that the Spanish government led today by the left or perhaps tomorrow by the right will end up canceling the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty operated by Pedro Sanchez?
So many chimeras that nourish his vision of new power relations and his permanent denial of new political realities.
If the Algerian regime, a stakeholder in this conflict and whose destiny and survival it links, can afford to grant itself thick blinders, this is not the case for French diplomacy, whose voices are rising internally to invite it to stop adopting the policy of the ostrich.
The Israeli turn on the Sahara, in addition to offering new perspectives to the new alliance between Morocco and Israel, is a direct questioning of the French choices in this region. It is recognized today that Paris has never looked favorably on the tripartite agreement signed between Morocco, Israel and the United States and which was at the origin of this great upheaval, it is just as certain that French diplomacy cannot voluntarily stay away from this new dynamic which is shaking the entire region and putting it on the track of a new destiny.
Except to think that Paris would take the strategic choice of a permanent cold break with Morocco by refraining from changing its perception of the Sahara conflict, French diplomacy has, in reality, no other choice but to join this international collective movement which acts on Morocco’s sovereignty over its Sahara.
Otherwise, the more time passes, the more French diplomacy adopts an immobility on this important question, the more the reasons for this abstinence will appear in broad daylight. The political pretext according to which Paris cannot support Rabat on pain of alienating Algiers seems to have had its day. Today, relations between Emmanuel Macron and the Algerian regime are on the upswing. The French president’s Algerian bet has definitively failed, as seems to show in terms of political symbolism the inability of the two countries to organize a visit by Algerian President Abdelamajid Tebboune to Paris, with all the contingencies and blockages that we know.
The French political Real should deal positively with the new deals created by American recognition, the Spanish and German turning points and the Israeli acceleration. Paris cannot remain in the gray zone indefinitely. She was useful for a while. It becomes dangerous today. And as this general movement in favor of Morocco tends to increase, having an ally as close as France which still expresses some form of hesitation will eventually become problematic for both countries.
The most optimistic are convinced that Emmanuel Macron will eventually grasp the importance of this historic political moment to hitch the French wagons to it. Failing this, this Franco-Moroccan sulk, which began as a bad mood, will end up having serious consequences on relations between France and this region of the Maghreb, to which it is bound by a dense human relationship, a rich economic cooperation and an inalienable community of destiny. So many factors that allow Emmanuel Macron to be daring.