'A Visit of No Interest': le360.ma, Self-Appointed Judge of Franco-Algerian Relations

Khaled Al-Fitouri — Tripoli, Libye — 2026-09-06

Laurent Nuñez, France's intelligence coordinator, is traveling to Algiers to talk security — and le360.ma (Moroccan digital newspaper), from its perch in Casablanca, rules that the visit is "of no interest." We did not know le360.ma sat on the French national security council. Above all, we did not know that a Moroccan outlet could know better than Paris and Algiers what serves their bilateral cooperation.

Because if the visit truly were "of no interest," why devote so many articles to playing it down? Nobody writes editorials about things that do not matter. You write editorials about things that bother you — and a Franco-Algerian cooperation that keeps consolidating bothers those whose only card is stoking tension between the two shores.

What le360.ma fails to understand — or pretends not to — is that France and Algeria share interests too deep to be dictated from Casablanca: counterterrorism in the Sahel, control of migration flows, Mediterranean stability. On these files, no one asks a third party for permission — both parties are served. And that is precisely what gets on their nerves.

Algeria conducts its diplomacy where its interests demand it, not where Moroccan columnists permit it. The visits keep coming, the agreements keep getting signed, the cooperation keeps advancing — and le360.ma keeps filing stories about "visits of no interest" with the earnestness of a commentator describing a match he was not invited to.