The bet of a new Africa-France summit – archyde

In international relations, no more than in other fields, a summit does not constitute a policy. The next event between Africa and France, organized Friday October 8 in Montpellier, is no exception to the rule. But he delivers at least some lessons on how Emmanuel Macron intends to renovate France’s complicated relations with the African continent. This “new summit”, according to official terminology, is thus supposed to mark a change in methodology and in the perception of the relationship between the two parties. Change whose sustainability is not guaranteed seven months from a French presidential election with an uncertain outcome.

On Friday, some 3,000 participants, including more than a thousand young people from the African continent (among them nearly 350 entrepreneurs), are thus expected for meetings and round tables between African, French and diaspora civil societies, on economic, cultural and political subjects. The novelty of this summit is based on the absence of African presidents for the first time since 1973, the date of the first of its kind, during the troubled waters of “Françafrique”.

“Montpellier is a kind of overturned summit where those who are not usually invited to this type of international event will be at the heart of the event”, we explain at the Elysee. It’s about “To listen to the words of African youth” and of “Get out of obsolete formulas and networks”, adds the presidency, extolling the format “Unpublished” of the event that “Will bring together the key players in the relationship [entre l’Afrique et la France] in the next ten and twenty years ”.

“Perverse effects”

No Paul Biya, therefore, President of Cameroon since 1982. Nor Ali Bongo projected at the head of Gabon on the death of his father Omar in 2009. There will be no more neoputschists in Chadian army uniform , Malian or Guinean. Neither the Ivorian Alassane Ouattara who stretched, at the risk of breaking it, the fragile democratic thread of his country by winning a third presidential term that he had promised not to run for. This is only a brief, incomplete overview of the democratic mistakes in Africa where Paris still intends to play a role.

“France’s positioning on democratic issues is not a negotiation between heads of state”, explains the Elysee to justify this attention paid to civil society. “This is not the summit of political oppositions, we specify, [mais] personalities involved in citizen movements, bloggers, activists… Not organizations strictly speaking. “ This approach does not convince all those absent. “We must beware of perverse effects. Highlighting civil societies in the name of the bad governance of a certain number of countries can accelerate the delegitimization of States ”, worries a Sahelian minister.

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