Appointed at the head of the Embassy of the Kingdom in Paris, the now ex-Minister of the Economy will have a lot of work to do to restore relations between Rabat and the former colonial power, recently enamelled with many hiccups. Will he be the man for the job?
Paris, Mohamed Benchaâboun has already represented Morocco there, and very well: it was in the first half of the 1980s, and the one who is preparing to celebrate his sixtieth birthday on November 12, 2021, was then attending, along with many other brilliant Moroccan students called later to be part of the elite of the Kingdom, one of the famous French grandes écoles and in this case the National School of Telecommunications (ENST). At Télécom Paris, as it is commonly called, Mr. Benchaâboun has remained strongly attached, to the point of chairing until May 31, 2021, the Telecom Paris Alumni Maroc (ATAM) Association, which brings together the national winners of the establishment, before passing the baton to the CEO of the Intelcia group, Karim Bernoussi.
Historical partner
But it is a different kettle of fish to be in charge of the Cherifian diplomacy in the French capital: replaced two days earlier by Nadia Fettah Alaoui at the head of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Mr. Benchaâboun s ‘is therefore seen designate, during the Council of Ministers chaired this October 17, 2021, by King Mohammed VI at the royal palace in the city of Fez, Ambassador of Morocco in France. The communiqué of the Royal Cabinet published in the wake of this Council of Ministers insisted that it is “on the proposal of the Head of Government and on the initiative of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation, and Moroccans residing abroad ”That“ His Majesty the King, may God assist him, has been good enough to appoint [him] and, by the way, Youssef Amrani, transferred from South Africa to the Belgian capital, Brussels,
All the more so as Mr. Benchaâboun has, as we know, for a long time to leave with the Head of government in question, in this case, Aziz Akhannouch; the common membership of the two men to the party of the National Rally of Independents (RNI), chaired by Mr. Akhannouch, never having really brought them together – the latter had notably published, in April 2020, a media platform to castigate the “policy of ‘austerity’ by Mr. Benchaâboun, even qualified as a ‘big mistake’.
And what is more, Mr. Akhannouch himself insisted, following the irredentist declarations of December 2016 by the secretary-general of the Istiqlal (PI) Party, Hamid Chabat, on Mauritania, that diplomacy, as a whole, must to be and remains a “reserved domain” of the King. It is, therefore, without a doubt, an eminently royal choice to see Mr. Benchaâboun take up his post at 5, rue Le Tasse.
Which, moreover, informs part of his motivations: as we have known since his enthronement in July 1999, King Mohammed VI likes to rely on men of confidence, as soon as they prove their worth. An eloquent case is also that of the now predecessor of Mr. Benchaâboun in Paris and new Minister of National Education, Preschool and Sports, Chakib Benmoussa, who has in turn been Minister of the Interior – after having been nearly four years during the Secretary-General of the same department, President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) and President of the Special Commission on the Development Model (CSMD).
Particular experience
Belonging, for nearly two years, to the same generation as King Mohammed VI, Mr. Benchaâboun has not, over the past twenty years or so, been outdone: from September 2003 to February 2008, he was Chief Executive Officer of the National Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (ANRT), before remaining for more than ten years Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Central People’s Bank (BCP). Until therefore becoming, in August 2018, Minister of the Economy in place of Mohamed Boussaïd, sacked after having inserted controversial provisions into the draft finance law (PLF) relating to the sale by the Saham group of Moulay Hafid Elalamy – then Minister of Industry, Investment, Trade, and Digital Economy – of his insurance branch in South Africa Sanlam.
But as soon as he obtained his diploma from Télécom Paris in 1984, Mr. Benchaâboun had, in fact, started to widen his path: he began his career within the Moroccan subsidiary of Alcatel-Alstom, at a time when the latter is the second-largest company in France, then joined, already, in August 1996, the Ministry of the Economy, and this as director of the administration of customs and indirect taxes. He stayed there for some three years, and, for the first time at the turn of the century, turned to the banking sector, being successive, as deputy director-general, in charge of common services and the development pole of the BCP, of which he will therefore preside over destinies later.
Did this particular experience in the field of finance also count when deciding to install it on the banks of the Seine river? We will undoubtedly know more, as we go along, but what is certain is that the economic dominance is increasingly imposed not only at the level of relations with France, but generally all European countries, at a time when Morocco now aspires to take advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to recover some of the industrial units that the Old Continent aspires to “repatriate” from China, which has turned out to be too far away at the time where international supply chains have seized up at the same time that it is becoming more and more expensive.
And as such, diplomatic work is often decisive: we remember, for example, that it is thanks to the personal interpersonal skills of King Mohammed VI, who then dispatched Prime Minister Driss Jettou himself to France, that Morocco had been able to snatch from Turkey’s nose and beard the opening by Renault of the factory which will eventually see the light of day in September 2007 in the city of Tangier – the Sovereign will even take the phone to call the CEO of the group automobile, Carlos Ghosn, and convince him.
And, one can imagine, there is a heavy work which, in this regard, awaits Mr. Benchaâboun, especially as a part of the French political class, of the left as even more and more of the right – with at the head of the “rebels”, the far-right polemicist and putative presidential candidate Eric Zemmour-, pushes more and more open to what she calls the “relocation” of French factories from overseas and in particular those of Morocco: the French Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, had himself castigated, in October 2019, these factories, citing the Kingdom by name as well as Slovakia and Turkey, before backing down, following the controversy, during his January 2020 visit to Morocco.
Potential tropism
But we must not neglect the purely political aspect of Moroccan-French relations, and this in the logic of “independence in interdependence” defended in particular, at the time of France’s departure in March 1956, by the former president of the French council of ministers, Edgar Faure.
Sous le président Emmanuel Macron, dont on redoutait un potentiel tropisme algérien du fait de ses déclarations généralement avenantes envers la voisine de l’Est au cours de sa campagne de 2016-2017, ces relations sont finalement restées “normales” dans le fond, en ce sens qu’en dehors des dérapages sinon néocolonialistes, du moins paternalistes habituels -comme par exemple eu égard à la décision du 28 septembre 2021 du gouvernement français de réduire le nombre de visas octroyés aux citoyens marocains sous le prétexte fallacieux et à vrai dire électoraliste de non-coopération en matière de migration irrégulière-, il n’y a pas eu de véritable changement de doctrine, notamment et surtout par rapport au différend avec l’Algérie autour de la région du Sahara, où Paris continue d’appuyer l’initiative marocaine du 11 avril 2007 pour la négociation d’un statut d’autonomie.
But it is precisely this normal character that Morocco no longer wants now: evoking, at a press conference, this dispute, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Bourita, had twice called on Europe in particular, in January and March 2021, to get out of its “comfort zone” and decide.
Friendship relations
The same minister had also indicated, in an interview broadcast by the electronic media Kifache TV four days after the recognition of December 10, 2021, by the United States of the sovereignty of Morocco over its Saharan provinces, that he did not ‘There was no longer any need for the usual language trying to defend the peace process carried out since September 1991 under the aegis of the United Nations (UN) but without really taking the plunge and recognizing complete territorial integrity from the Kingdom to the town of Lagouira, on the border with Mauritania.
A follower of “at the same time”, an expression he often has in his mouth, Mr. Macron has spent almost his entire mandate trying to spare the cabbage and the goat, leaving for example his party of The Republic on the march ( LREM) to open a branch in the city of Dakhla, in the Moroccan Sahara, while regretting, through the spokesperson of the government, this decision.
And this to remain the tail between the legs: in the end and for having simply recalled, on September 30, 2021, certain truths relating to the Algerian system, in particular its “politico-military” character, he saw the neighbor of the East breaking with his country and prohibit French military planes from overflying its territory, while for example the Algerian Minister of Labor, El Hachemi Djaâboub, did not hesitate to qualify on April 8, 2021, France as a “traditional and eternal enemy”.
And on the Moroccan side and even if King Mohammed VI congratulated himself, in his last speech on the Revolution of the King and the people of August 20, 2021, on “solid relations of friendship and mutual esteem which unite [him] to [ Mr.] Macron ”, a kind of suspicion ends up, willy-nilly, by setting in. Having from now on the well-established reputation of “man of files”, Mr. Benchaâboun will, in fact, have a lot of work to do from now on to help really put the course of the relations between Morocco and France in the correct direction of the ‘Story. In Paris itself he had therefore become an eminent specialist in telecommunications; now the time has come for him to show that he can also be illustrated in terms of human “networks”