Algeria: with the visit of the Minister of the Armed Forces and the return of the French ambassador, relations are warming up

France announced on Friday May 8, 2026 the return of its ambassador to Algeria, during a ministerial visit which should make it possible to restore dialogue between Paris and Algiers. The French Minister for the Armed Forces and Veterans, Alice Rufo, and Ambassador Stéphane Romatet, who was recalled to Paris in April 2025 by President Emmanuel Macron, began their journey with a symbolic stopover in Sétif.

This city as well as those of Guelma and Kherrata were the scene of a bloody repression of independence demonstrations carried out by the French army from May 8, 1945, causing 45,000 deaths according to Algiers and between 1,500 and 20,000 dead (including 103 Europeans), according to various French sources.

Tribute filled with symbols

Alice Rufo and her Algerian counterpart, Abdelmalek Tachrift, led a procession of several hundred people, made up of officials but also residents, some displaying the colors of the Algerian flag. The two ministers laid wreaths on a stele in memory of Bouzid Saâl, whose death by the bullets of French forces had triggered riots, which were violently repressed.

“The lucidity with which France looks at history must today make it possible to establish confident and promising relationships for the futureâ€to souligné l’Élysée dans un communiqué. The date of the 8th anniversary, baptisée « Journée de la mémoire » in Algérie, est “a strong marker on the identity level for Algerian nationalism, which must be taken into account”underlined the historian Benjamin Stora, present in the French delegation.

The delegate minister then flew to Algiers where she must be received by Saturday “by the Algerian authorities with whom she will discuss in particular the next stages of consolidation” Franco-Algerian relations and the French desire to “Restore effective dialogue”indicated the Élysée without further detail.

This trip follows a deep diplomatic crisis between Paris and Algiers, triggered in the summer of 2024 by the support provided by Paris to an autonomy plan « sous souveraineté marocaine » for the disputed territory of Western Sahara. The crisis worsened with the arrest in November 2024 of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal (pardoned by President Tebboune in November 2025) and after the indictment in April 2025 of a Algerian consular agent accused of being involved in the kidnapping in France of an Algerian influencer, Amir DZ. This affair led to the reciprocal expulsion of a dozen diplomats and consular agents and the recall of Ambassador Stéphane Romatet.

This rupture was fueled by the positions taken by the French Minister of the Interior at the time Bruno Retailleau, holding a hard line, who had crystallized the criticism of Algiers on his person.

The Christophe Gleizes case

A warming up began with the visit in mid-February of his successor Laurent Nuñez, received by President Tebboune. Since then, the expulsions of Algerians in an irregular situation in France, until then frozen, have resumed and, in mid-March, the heads of diplomacy of the two countries spoke for the first time in months.

There remains one unresolved case, a symbol of the crisis between the two countries: the case of journalist Christophe Gleizes, to whom the Élysée claimed to have a “Attention priority”. The 37-year-old sports journalist was arrested in May 2024 as part of a report on the JSK, a football club in Kabylie (north-east), and sentenced on appeal in early December to seven years in prison for “apology of terrorism”.

His family announced on Tuesday that he had withdrawn his cassation appeal since March, a move aimed at paving the way for a possible pardon from President Tebboune. “These important steps in strengthening the relationship between France and Algeria give hope and confidence in an early outcome to the human tragedy experienced by Christophe Gleizes and his family.”reacted Thibaut Bruttin, director of Reporters Without Borders.