For several months, Algerian press outlets aligned with the authorities, public media, and security-linked relays have been portraying Abu Dhabi as a new strategic enemy. Accusations are flying: regional interference, destabilization of the Sahel, alleged support for the MAK, financing of hostile media campaigns, rapprochement with Morocco. No evidence has been provided, but one certainty remains: the Algerian regime needs an external culprit to justify its decline.
This hysteria stands in stark contrast to a truth the authorities are trying to erase: Algeria has never been so alone on the international stage, while Morocco continues to secure diplomatic backing, strategic partnerships, and growing recognition of its positions, particularly on the Sahara. Unable to compete on the ground of realism and influence, Algiers opts for victimhood and invective.
What is most striking is the regime’s selective amnesia. Under Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the Emirates were courted, indulged, and served. Ports were granted without tenders, the tobacco industry was handed over, military projects were imposed against expert advice, defective weapons were approved by decree, land was sold off cheaply, abusive expropriations multiplied, and massive real estate scandals emerged, including Dunia Parc. Algeria was not sovereign; it was a private preserve.
Today, the same circles that gave everything away yesterday are shouting about interference. Worse still, the Algerian state was forced to pay 280 million dollars to an Emirati fund following a lost international arbitration case, a striking symbol of the incompetence and irresponsibility of a power that squanders public money before pointing to imaginary enemies.
The recent termination of the Algerian-Emirati air transport agreement is a politically heavy but above all desperate act. It illustrates a punitive and irrational diplomacy, driven not by national interest but by the obsessions of a military apparatus incapable of accepting that the world no longer revolves around Algiers.
The invective and disgraceful statements made by President Tebboune, mixing the memory of martyrs with insults, barely veiled threats, and personal attacks, confirm the nervous state of a regime that governs through resentment. When a state confuses foreign policy with personal vendettas, it ceases to be credible.
Algeria is not breaking with the Emirates because it is strong. It is breaking because it is weakened, surrounded by its own failures, and trapped in an obsolete ideological framework. In the absence of reforms, vision, and civilian leadership, the military regime chooses diplomatic chaos as a last refuge.
But by burning bridges one after another, Algeria risks facing a brutal mirror: that of a country stripped of diplomatic value and totally impoverished by its senile and mafia-like rulers.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv