MACRON’S BLUNT STYLE MAY HARM BID FOR NEW AFRICAN CHAPTER

French President Emmanuel Macron has once again resorted to outspoken language as a tool of diplomatic strategy, this time targeting the president of the Central African Republic (CAR).

He described Faustin-Archange Touadéra as a “hostage” of Wagner, a Russian military contractor that has been helping the CAR government fight rebels threatening to overrun the capital, Bangui.

Paris is also angered by the anti-French social media messag

es that emanate from sources close to Mr Touadéra, stirring up resentment against the former colonial power.

It was the intervention by French and African troops in 2013 that saved CAR from a

potentially genocidal civil conflict and created the conditions for the democratic elections that brought Mr Touadéra to power in 2016.

But the CAR now relies heavily on Russian military expertise and has also signed mining deals with Russia, allowing it to explore for gold, diamonds and uranium.

Uneasy about the lurch towards Moscow and angered by the anti-French rhetoric, Mr Macron has suspended budget support for the CAR government.

Mr Macron also concluded that a blunt public warning was needed, through a now widely publicised 30 May interview with the Journal du Dimanche (JDD).

His outspoken words met with no direct response, although Mr Touadéra’s government says its arrangement is with the Russian defence ministry rather than Wagner.

But the Central African head of state was not the only target of his plain speaking.

He warned Mali – where interim Vice-President Colonel Assimi Goïta has staged a fresh coup to depose the president and prime minister – that French troops deployed to help in the fight against militant Islamists could be pulled out if the West African state went down the path of Islamist radicalism.

While warning Mali’s transitional leaders against cutting a soft deal with jihadists, his comments perhaps also sought to reassure voters back home that French troops in the Sahel region were not being asked to put their lives on the line in vain.

Mr Macron’s style certainly contrasts with the clubby networking that used to characterise so much of the relationships between French presidents and African political élites – a sometimes complacent culture, summed up in the term Françafrique.

This tended to reinforce incumbent power rather than responding to wider demands for reform or social and economic development.