“The ideal scenario imagined by the Elysée has shattered, a kind of gradual and orderly disengagement, has shattered”, Vincent Hugeux, journalist, teacher at Sciences Po, declared Monday, January 31 on franceinfo, after the announcement by the military junta in power in Mali of the expulsion within 72 hours of the French ambassador. France has “take note” of the expulsion of its ambassador, the French Foreign Ministry said on Monday. “On feels good in the official response of France, a desire to get out of a deadly head-to-head with Bamako.“, underlined the journalist.
franceinfo: What is the strategy of the military junta in Mali?
Vincent Hugeux: Everything indicates that the putschists are yielding to the temptation of a form of sovereignist forcing. They enjoy clear support from a very significant section of Malian public opinion, particularly in Bamako.
“France appears as an ideal punching bag. to maintain this kind of national harmony and to impose a timetable that allows them to confiscate the levers of the executive for several more years.”
Vincent Hugeux, teacher at Sciences Poat franceinfo
As on the side of Paris there is a form of strategy of tension with a rhetorical one-upmanship, one has the impression of having two boxers who fight in the same ring hoping to take advantage of a radicalization of their execrable relations.
What is France’s interest?
The dismantling of an operation like Barkhane, if only from a logistical point of view, is a form of nightmare. What seems very clear is that the ideal scenario imagined by the Elysée, a kind of gradual and orderly disengagement, has been shattered. France no longer has control. We feel in France’s official response, a desire to get out of a deadly head-to-head with Bamako.
Is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, right to denounce the increasingly strong presence of the Russians?
We feel that this is a recurring angle of attack and that it is not the first time that a French official has denounced the intrusion of mercenaries from the private company Wagner, which we know is infinitely linked to the Kremlin on the Malian territory. We feel that with the deployment of Wagner, there is an intensification of French rhetoric and perhaps also it is a question of exerting pressure so that the Malian junta can no longer invoke a timetable that would lead to an election general in five years, but perhaps to find a compromise that would reduce this deadline to 12 or 16 months.