“The age of Françafrique is over” and France is now a “neutral interlocutor” on the continent, Emmanuel Macron said Thursday in Gabon, where he is taking part in a summit on the protection of tropical forests, at the start of a four-day tour of the region.

“This age of Françafrique is over and I sometimes have the feeling that mentalities are not evolving at the same pace as us when I read, I hear, I see that France is still attributed intentions that she doesn’t have, that she doesn’t have anymore,” he told the French community in Gabon, stressing also that the French military reorganization he announced Monday in a speech in Paris did not is “neither a withdrawal nor a disengagement”.

In recent years, France has sought to break with “Françafrique”, its opaque practices and networks of influence inherited from colonialism. But on the continent, Emmanuel Macron is still criticized for continuing his meetings with African leaders deemed authoritarian.

The French president participates Thursday in Libreville in a summit called One Forest Summit, co-organized by France and Gabon and intended to find “concrete solutions” for the conservation of forests, the protection of the climate and species in a context of climate change. . A meeting which will “not have the objective of having new political declarations adopted”, the organizers underlined in advance.

They specify that it will mainly aim to implement the objectives set by the Paris climate agreement (2015), which aims for carbon neutrality by 2050, and the Montreal COP15 on biodiversity (2022) tending to sanctuary 30% of the planet by 2030 to protect land, oceans and species from pollution, degradation and the climate crisis.

The French head of state first went in the morning to Arboretum Raponda Walker Park, one of the protected areas on the Gabonese coast north of Libreville, before speaking to the French community of country at the residence of the French ambassador. He is to participate in the afternoon in meetings with scientists, NGOs and private sector actors at the presidential palace.

Other Heads of State including Denis Sassou-Nguesso (Congo-Brazzaville), Faustin-Archange Touadéra (Central African Republic), Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno (Chad) or Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (Equatorial Guinea) will also make the trip. The French and Gabonese presidents will conclude the summit with two speeches at the end of the day.

The One Forest Summit began on Wednesday with discussions between ministers, civil society and experts on several themes (sustainable forest management, biodiversity, financing).

The arrival of Emmanuel Macron has been decried by part of the Gabonese political opposition and civil society, who accuse him of coming to “doubt” Ali Bongo while the Gabonese will elect a new president this year. Ali Bongo had succeeded his father, Omar Bongo Ondimba, after the death of this pillar of Françafrique who led the country for 41 years.

Ali Bongo was re-elected under controversial conditions in 2016 and will likely stand for re-election this year. This is Emmanuel Macron’s eighteenth trip to Africa since the start of his first five-year term in 2017, where French influence and presence are increasingly questioned.

Since 2022, the French army has been pushed out of Mali and Burkina Faso by the ruling juntas in these two countries. On Tuesday, the day after Emmanuel Macron’s speech on Africa, Burkina also denounced a military assistance agreement signed with France in 1961, the year after the country’s independence from a former French colony.

Bolstered by mercenaries from the Wagner group and disinformation campaigns that fuel anti-French sentiment, Russia is increasingly outweighing Paris in this historic French sphere of influence.

Emmanuel Macron presented Monday from Paris his African strategy for the next four years. He advocated “humility” and encouraged a new “balanced” and “responsible” partnership with African countries. He also announced a reduction in the French military presence, which has been concentrated for ten years on the fight against jihadism in the Sahel.

After Gabon, the French president will travel to Angola where he will sign an agreement aimed at developing the agricultural sector there, then to Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He will then make a brief stopover in Brazzaville, where Denis Sassou Nguesso has ruled the Congo with an iron fist for almost forty years. A meeting which again risks appearing against the grain of his speech on Monday.

He will conclude his tour in the DRC, a former Belgian colony, but also the largest French-speaking country in the world, where President Félix Tshisekedi, in power since January 2019, is preparing for an election this year. This step can also be tricky when France is accused in the DRC of siding with Rwanda, at a time when Kinshasa accuses its Rwandan neighbor of supporting the “M23”, a rebellion active in eastern Congo. Support that has been corroborated by UN experts but remains denied as a whole by Kigali.