The tensions between France and Algeria, never far from the surface, broke again when Algeria was moving to expel 12 managers working at the French Embassy and Consulate.
The Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Monday that French officials had 48 hours to leave the country.
Friday, the decision of Algeria followed the arrest in France of an Algerian official accused of participation in the kidnapping last year of an Algerian influencer known as “Amir Dz. “”
“This shameful act, by which the Minister of the Interior sought to humiliate Algeria, was perpetrated without regard for the agent’s consular status,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Algeria said in a statement.
France reacted with its own threats. “We are ready to act,” said Jean-Nobé Barrot, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs. “Algerian authorities do not have a few hours to cancel their decision.”
The Algerian official was charged with suspicion “arrest, kidnapping, illegal confinement or arbitrary detention in connection with a terrorist enterprise”, said French prosecutors national anticortivaters in a statement.
He and two other people were detained.
“Amir Dz” has lived in France since 2016 and obtained political asylum in 2023.
For years, Algeria has demanded its extradition, delivering nine international arrest mandates for accusations of fraud and terrorist offenses. French courts have rejected the request.
“None of the companies has passed from trauma, there are therefore always people in Algeria and France who are interested in torpedoing this climate of conciliation,” said Khadija Mohsen-Finan, political scientist of the Panthéon-Sorbonne.
France ruled Algeria for more than a century, as a colony and then part of its territory. Algeria won its independence in 1962, after a devastating war, but the tensions between the two countries remained almost constant.
Last week, Mr. Barrot visited Algiers to try to relaunch relations and put to rest a diplomatic crisis almost a year.
The relationship had seemed to relax when President Emmanuel Macron called his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, at the end of March. But the conciliation proved to be illusory.
Relations have been particularly bad since last summer, when Mr. Macron announced the French support for Morocco’s sovereignty over the west of the Sahara, a territory whose control of Algeria disputes.
The situation was aggravated by the arrest last November in Algiers of an Algerian French writer, Boualem Sansal, on the accusations of undermining national unity and security.
Mr. Macron, alongside many intellectuals and civil servants, was indignant. He called for the author’s release, who would be 80 years old, who was sentenced to five years in prison at the end of March.
