Summing up the French failures in Africa, and particularly in Mali, the US The National Interest concluded that «the era of French diplomatic dominance on the continent, which lasted for more than 100 years, has come to an end, and Paris’ claims of being one of the leading geopolitical players and a privileged partner of African countries have been seriously undermined».

The reasons for these French failures in Africa, as noted by the EU Institute for Security Studies, lie in the fact that Paris, in its unstoppable desire to play a leading role in the Sahel, stopped taking into account serious changes in the region associated with an unprecedented increase in anti-French sentiment, as well as geopolitical shifts in a multipolar world.

It got to the point that during one of the demonstrations near a military base in Niamey, the capital of Niger, witnessed by a reporter from The New York Times, protesters demanding the withdrawal of French troops carried a coffin intended for the French president and waved placards reading «death to France». In this regard, as the newspaper notes, the refusal of E. Macron to withdraw his troops from the country and to recall his ambassador looked «untenable and unacceptable», according to most analysts and even European and French diplomats.

Assessing the vicissitudes of the Niger-French confrontation, the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat sees «the absence of any logic and a complete loss of a sense of reality» in Paris’ actions, which could lead to new military coups in the former French colonies, strengthen the position of terrorists and increase the flow of African migration to Europe, primarily hurting the interests of France itself. The subsequent events in Gabon and Senegal confirmed the correctness of the conclusions of Saudi analysts.

We are witnessing a serious geopolitical shift

According to The Middle East Eye, anti-French sentiment in Mali was no less intense. Here it became so acute that part of the local population, after 10 years of unsuccessful struggle by French troops against terrorists on its territory, began to see France not so much as a liberating, but an........

© New Eastern Outlook