Failed again. Scheduled for February 12, the visit to Algiers of Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, which was to confirm the warming of relations between Algiers and Madrid, was canceled at the last minute. A change of heart decided by the Spanish minister himself, due, officially, to “calendar problems” on the Algerian side.

According to several sources in Algiers, Madrid would not have accepted a departure from the practice in force in Algeria which requires the President of the Republic to grant an audience to the ministers of foreign affairs visiting Algiers.

According to the daily Le Soir d’Algérie, citing a “well-informed” Algerian source, the authorities have expressed serious reservations about the “ambiguous positions” of José Manuel Albare on the Sahrawi issue, “unlike his head of government [Pedro Sanchez ] which has clearly evolved on this issue”.

Minimum normalization with Spain

By refusing to receive the Spanish minister, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune seems to want to stick to at least normalization with Spain. The Algerian head of state had, in June 2022, made harsh remarks against the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sanchez, who made a radical change in Madrid’s position on the Western Sahara conflict by qualifying, on March 18, 2022, the Moroccan plan for “the most serious, realistic and credible basis for the resolution of this dispute”.

Aggravating circumstances in the eyes of the Algerian authorities, this shift, of which they were not informed, was announced by a press release from the royal palace in Rabat. “We have very strong ties with the Spanish state, but the head of government [Pedro Sanchez] has broken everything,” declared President Tebboune, denouncing a turnaround that was “morally and historically unacceptable.”

Retaliatory measures then followed one another: recall of the Algerian ambassador in Madrid, suspension of the treaty of friendship and good neighborliness with Spain and freezing of trade except for hydrocarbons. The crisis lasted nineteen months with significant economic consequences for Spanish companies.

In November 2023, a new ambassador, Abdelfattah Daghmoum, was appointed to Madrid, the beginning of a return to normal. The standoff seemed all the more futile as Pedro Sanchez managed the feat of remaining in power after the legislative elections of July 2023, the Spanish right not having gathered a majority in Parliament.

Support for the Moroccan autonomy plan

To justify this change of attitude towards Spain after nineteen months of standoff, the Algerian authorities highlighted the very precise comments of Pedro Sanchez on the question of Western Sahara in his speech at the UN General Assembly. The Algerian media engaged in an exegesis of the speech, noting that the Spanish leader had pleaded for a solution to the conflict in Western Sahara within the framework of the United Nations charter and the resolutions of the UN Security Council “without reference to its previous position aligned with the Moroccan autonomy plan. »

The same reading was made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Attaf, in an interview with the Al-Jazeera channel in December 2023. According to him, Spain has changed its position “180 degrees”. “What gave the green light to the reassessment of our relations with Spain was the speech given by Pedro Sanchez at the United Nations General Assembly and he changed his position,” he assured.

The assertion left observers doubtful, with neither Pedro Sanchez nor his foreign minister having denied the letter sent to King Mohammed VI supporting the Moroccan autonomy plan. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and undoubtedly the military establishment are obviously less convinced of the “180 degree” change in the Spanish position. “It seems that despite the thaw, there are still unresolved differences between the two capitals,” notes the Algerian TSA website.

Western Sahara is a central axis of Algerian foreign policy. The conflict aggravates relations between Algeria and Morocco, already marked by the seal of distrust since the “war of the sands” of 1963. In 1994, Algeria decided, in response to the establishment of visas for Algerians by Morocco following an attack in Marrakech, wrongly attributed to the Algerian services, to close its land border with the neighbor. Algiers decided, in December 2021, to sever diplomatic relations with Morocco.