“Connect in the evening”, “try with the Mozilla Firefox operator”, “opt for private browsing”… Algerian Facebook groups are full of advice to help visa applicants for France get an appointment. Despite the calming of diplomatic relations between Algiers and Paris after months of tension, finding a niche on the VFS Global platform, the subcontractor of French consular services, remains a challenge. The site is so congested and availability so limited that many candidates end up throwing in the towel or entrusting their file to informal providers, in return for money.
“It’s a real mental burden,” says Asma, a thirty-year-old from Algeria, in the process of family reunification. For two weeks my life revolved only around the VFS Global site. At the beginning, I was categorical: I refused to enrich people who profit from our hardship. But the desperation was such that I started looking for the contact of a provider. »
A minimum wage for an appointment
The activity of these facilitators is booming in Algeria. Their role: dedicate all their time to the booking platforms and support the bugs on behalf of the requesters. A thankless task that has to be paid for. The price range varies between 5,000 Algerian dinars and 20,000 dinars (136 euros) per appointment, the equivalent of the Algerian minimum wage. To justify the difference, the service providers pretend to be available at the platform until late hours, or a request involving the reservation of a hotel and a plane ticket.
According to the specialist site Schengen Visa info, Algerians would have spent 31 million euros in 2022 with the consular services of the Schengen area member states, notably Spain and France. These figures are undoubtedly below reality, as the costs add up.
After twenty consecutive days without being able to make an appointment on VFS Global, Youcef*, an executive in a pharmaceutical laboratory, decided to pay 10,000 dinars to a service provider. An amount almost equivalent to the fee requested for the visa itself. But the engineer did not hesitate. “I have been applying for a long-term visa since 2005, I have relatives in France whom I visit regularly, but I have never struggled so much,” he confides.
“We watch the platform all day long”
While some facilitators are discreet and rely on word of mouth to make themselves known, others clearly show their colors. This is the case of an internet café located in the popular district of Belouizdad, in Algiers. This afternoon, around ten customers are waiting in front of the window. “We book appointments for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, but no longer for France. Because of the scarcity of slots, it is no longer profitable,” explains Fayçal*, an employee.
The service offered is a technological-bureaucratic craft: “We monitor the platform all day long. As soon as slots open, we call customers from a pre-established list. They have to tell us the OTP [One Time Password] they receive, but if they don’t respond when we contact them, we move on to the next customer on the list,” describes Fayçal.
Previously, unofficial providers used their own phone numbers to get appointments and then resold the slots. VFS Global hoped to stem the phenomenon by introducing the OTP code, sent directly to applicants on their mobile. But operators have adapted.
“Political management of niches”
In Birtouta, in the southern suburbs of Algiers, Nashida, employed in a travel agency, also spends her days on the sites of VFS Global and BLS, the two official providers of French and Spanish consular services. The 40-year-old from Algeria books appointments for 5,000 dinars per person. A small job that she has been doing since 2019, but which she considers less and less profitable.
Denouncing “political management of meeting slots”, she is convinced that the recurring diplomatic crises between Algiers and Paris are at the origin of this blockage. The same goes for Spanish visas: Algeria suspended in 2022 the “treaty of friendship, good neighborliness and cooperation” concluded twenty years earlier with Spain, after its change of heart on the Western Sahara issue. to get closer to Morocco’s position. “That’s when the restriction on appointment slots started,” Nashida recalls.
In 2021, the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced a 50% reduction in the granting of visas for Algerians in order to encourage the country to take back its nationals in an irregular situation. In December 2022 the same official announced “a return to normal” in the issuance of visas. But “meetings are becoming increasingly rare,” notes Nashida. In my opinion, this is a way to keep the same delivery rate. »
In March, Le Monde revealed that an “evaluation mission” of France’s visa policy had been entrusted to Paul Hermelin, president of digital services giant Capgemini. According to the mission letter signed by ministers Catherine Colonna and Gérald Darmanin, he must “identify avenues for improving appointment and processing times.” A project still in progress.
