Algeria orders French embassy staff members to leave amid new diplomatic spat over influencer’s abduction
SMA NEWS – ALGERIA
The Franco-Algerian relationship has been particularly volatile in the last nine months. [Getty] Algeria ordered Monday twelve staff members at the French embassy in Algiers to leave the country within 48 hours, a move Paris quickly condemned and warned would trigger immediate retaliation.
The expulsion order came just two days after French authorities detained an Algerian consular official suspected of involvement in the April 2024 abduction of Amir Boukhors, an Algerian dissident and online influencer, on French soil.
“This decision, unrelated to any ongoing judicial process, must be reversed. Should Algeria proceed, we will have no choice but to respond immediately,” said France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, in a written statement shared with reporters.
Several of the individuals targeted for expulsion are officials from France’s interior ministry, according to a diplomatic source cited by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Meanwhile, Algeria’s foreign ministry denounced the arrest of its consular agent as “unacceptable and indefensible”, warning in a statement that the incident would cause “serious damage to Algerian-French relations” and promising it “will not go unanswered”.
French anti-terror prosecutors have charged three men—including the detained consular official—in connection with Boukhors’s abduction.
The charges include kidnapping and unlawful detention with suspected ties to a terrorist organisation, according to the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office.
The unfolding crisis threatens to derail what both sides had only recently portrayed as a diplomatic thaw.
France and Algeria diplomatic crisis
The Franco-Algerian relationship has been particularly volatile in the last nine months.
In July 2024, Macron’s public support for Morocco’s autonomy plan in Western Sahara outraged Algiers, which backs the separatist Polisario Front.
Tensions were further inflamed after a deadly knife attack in February 2025 in Mulhouse, committed by an Algerian national who had been subject to multiple deportation orders.
France has long demanded that Algeria take back its nationals slated for removal, a request Algiers has resisted.
The Mulhouse attack reignited the debate in Paris, with conservative ministers calling for the suspension of post-independence accords that facilitate the movement of Algerian nationals and diplomats.
Relations deteriorated further in the autumn after the arrest of 80-year-old Algerian-French author Boualem Sansal.
He was sentenced by an Algerian court to five years in prison over comments made on the far-right French platform Frontières, which authorities claimed undermined Algeria’s territorial integrity. Macron has since appealed to Tebboune for a presidential pardon, calling for “a gesture of clemency and humanity”.
After a period of near-total rupture, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and his French counterpart Macron agreed at the end of March to mend ties and relaunch diplomatic cooperation.
Last week, Barrot visited Algiers, hailing the beginning of “a new phase” in relations between the two countries in his meeting with President Tebboune.
Yet Monday’s developments suggest the recent rapprochement was short-lived. Paris and Algiers now appear poised for another diplomatic clash, one that both sides seem less ready to resolve any time soon.
