Relations between Algeria and France are settling into a zone of silence. As Paris multiplies symbolic gestures to reopen dialog (the participation of its recalled ambassador to Paris in the ceremony paying tribute to the victims of October 17, 1961, the statement by the new Interior minister about the necessity to reestablish communication channels), Algiers remains mute.
This refusal to react is not a diplomatic accident, it marks a new era where the Algerian establishment shows its sovereignty and indifference, and where France is coming to realize that it no longer has a grip on the narrative.
The Algerian regime has built an essential part of its legitimacy on a discourse of national dignity and a symbolic breakaway from the former colonial power. To a public opinion that is suspicious toward France, the promise of an “peer-to-peer relationship” answers an identity imperative, one that erases past, inherited hierarchies and gives the State the stature of a respected power.
This demand, reiterated over several years, falls more within a performative register than a strategic one. The proclaimed sovereignty did not produce a coherent foreign policy but has chiefly served as an internal discourse and a proof of firmness for an establishment seeking legitimacy.
Beneath this veneer, dependance endures since the economy remains Europe-oriented, migratory and financial flows pass through France, and the bulk of tech, banking and cultural levers remain western. The discrepancy between discourse and reality shuts Algiers into a posture where sovereignty is measured by tone rather than by actual capacity for action.
For its part, France is struggling to redefine an Algeria policy that is moves beyond a politics of remembrance. Paris continues to mention “reconciliation”, “entangled memories” or a “youth on both shores”, but these phrases belong to an exhausted grammar. They imply a French centrality that no one in Algiers acknowledges anymore. Arrogance is no longer institutional, but cultural, grounded in the conviction that France still enjoys a special role to play in the future of Algeria.
A France held captive by its own legacy
The world, however, has changed. Asian, Russian, Turkish or Gulf partners have neither memories to heal nor guilt to manage. They move forward where France apologizes. They sign infrastructure, energy and defense contracts without invoking colonization or demanding universal values. This new competition relativizes France, forcing it to speak more softly, though it still does not know how.
The two countries indeed no longer inhabit the same political temporality. France remains confined within a postcolonial logic, seeking to settle the past, humanize memory, and “rebuild trust.” Algeria, by contrast, wants to move beyond it, seeking neither to forgive nor to settle scores; it wants to turn the page without having to sign it.
But by trying to set itself free from this historical bond, the Algerian establishment remains prisoner of its own language. Rejecting French influence becomes a substitute for an international vision. Algeria still does not think the relationship in other terms. It denies it, puts it at a distance, but does not imagine its new outlines. This dissonance transforms dialog into two parallel monologues where Paris speaks to its history and Algeria to its opinion.
Yet, the rhetoric of “equality” in reality masks two limitations. France is unable to shed its tutelary reflex, convinced that it can rebalance the relationship through symbols. Algeria, for its part, proclaims independence to compensate for its inability to envision a relational framework based on anything other than rupture.
The demand of equality thus produced its own trap, freezing the relationship into refusal, without offering a political perspective. Algeria no longer wants to be treated as a student but does not yet know how to be a partner. France wants to prove that it has changed but no longer knows how to be useful without seeming intrusive. Between them, there remains only a space saturated by memory, susceptibility and misunderstandings.
A world without French privilege
As this duel dies out, the world is moving forward. China builds, Turkey invests, Russia supports and Qatar finances. These powers no longer view Algeria through the French lens. They perceive in it a key geographic location, a strategic energy capacity and relative political stability in a Maghreb fraught with uncertainty.
In this new multipolar order, Algeria discovers that it can choose. It no longer needs the recognition of Paris to exist diplomatically, nor does it need its capital to finance its projects. In other words, France is still a proximate actor rather than a center of influence.
One of the most striking aspects of this reconfiguration is the way Algeria is learning to conceive of itself in a world where France is no longer an unavoidable point of passage. This shift is not merely diplomatic, it is psychological. France ceases to be the reference against which Algiers defines its actions. The center of gravity moves toward a multipolar environment where alliances are fluid, transactional, and devoid of emotional charge.
On the energy front, the war in Ukraine has accelerated this shift. Having once again become a strategic supplier for Europe, Algeria has regained an ability to arbitrate that it had long lost. Rome, Madrid, and Berlin now compete eagerly to secure access to Algerian gas, while American multinationals court its vast shale potential, whereas France, too long fixated on the memory issue, has lost ground. Gas is turning into an instrument of autonomy, a lever of silent diplomacy that Algiers wields not out of posturing anti-French sentiment, but as a calculated assertion of power.
In the security sphere, Algeria advances cautiously but confidently. The French withdrawal from Mali and the collapse of Western presence in the Sahel have created a vacuum that the Algerian authorities are observing with prudence. Without seeking to replace them, Algiers aims to reposition itself as a stabilizing power, drawing on its military experience and regional anchoring. Algerian diplomacy, long confined to the defense of national sovereignty, had already assumed a mediating role (in Niger, in Mali, and at times in Libya) without aligning itself with Western coalitions. The new context now fuels its ambition to exist not merely in counterpoint to France, but on its own terms.
This positioning is accompanied by a diversification of partners. China imposed itself as the leading infrastructure builder in the country, Turkey is becoming a major industrial actor and Russia is consolidating its position as an arms supplier and a diplomatic backer. Even Gulf monarchies such as Qatar, long viewed with suspicion, are establishing themselves as financiers of economic projects. Each provides a form of international recognition from which Algiers benefits without entering lasting commitments. Within this logic, France loses its exclusivity as well as its symbolic weight, becoming just one partner among others, neither vilified nor central.
The decoupling
This evolution has not yet translated into a coherent strategy. Algeria has not truly articulated a doctrine of regional power. Its diplomatic apparatus remains slow, its economy poorly diversified, and its political system still tightly controlled. Yet the matrix of its relationship with France has, for its part, cracked. The Algerian state, long shaped by the need to defend itself against French influence, now operates within a broader space of multiple interdependencies. The balance of power is no longer bilateral but contextual, fluid, and embedded in global competition.
For France, this new balance is destabilizing. Accustomed to viewing its relationship with Algiers as a privileged tête-à-tête, it now finds that it no longer holds any monopoly: political, cultural, or economic. The “French privilege,” inherited from history, has dissolved in the multipolar reality. What remains is merely geographic and human proximity; significant, yet without strategic translation. The Mediterranean is no longer an axis, but a boundary between a country oriented toward the Global South and another locked into its identity debates.
In short, Algiers’ silence in the face of French overtures is no longer a matter of tactical calculation; it reflects a genuine, political and psychological break. France, weakened and nostalgic for its former centrality, now speaks only to itself. Algeria, strengthened by its resources and new partners, behaves as an autonomous regional power, even if it has yet to fully convert this autonomy into a coherent strategy.
The Algerian leadership has not yet designed the framework of a new relationship, freed from postcolonial affect and populist reflex. But it has crossed a psychological threshold, that of symbolic independence. History no longer structures diplomacy. And while France continues to view Algeria through the prism of memory, Algeria now looks down on it, fully aware, at last, of its own weight.
