France is threatening its former colony Algeria with the cancellation of its special status if the country does not take back Algerians expelled from France, according to Prime Minister François Bayrou on Wednesday.
Facilitated entry for Algerians, including the 1968 Franco-Algerian agreement, would then be put to the test, Bayrou said in Paris, adding that France was not seeking such an escalation.
He intends to give Algiers four to six weeks to reconsider the situation and plans to send Algeria a priority list of people that France urgently wants to deport.
Bayrou’s words come in the wake of a terrorist attack in Mulhouse in the eastern Alsace region on Saturday in which an Algerian national living illegally in France killed one person and injured seven others.
France wanted to deport the attacker, who had been convicted of glorifying terrorism, back to Algeria, but the country refused to take back its citizen ten times. This caused outrage in France and further strained the already tense relations with Algeria.
President Emmanuel Macron offended Algeria in the last year when he recognised Morocco’s decades-old claim to Western Sahara. Meanwhile, France is outraged by the arrest of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal on his arrival in Algiers in mid-November. The winner of the 2011 German booksellers’ peace prize has since been detained in Algeria.
There is also a dispute over Algerian influencers living in France who are accused of inciting hatred and terror on social media. Paris failed in its attempt to deport one of them, as Algeria immediately sent him back.
