{"id":14980,"date":"2026-05-15T07:31:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T07:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/14980\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T07:31:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T07:31:59","slug":"why-macron-is-struggling-to-rebuild-frances-ties-with-africa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/14980\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Macron is struggling to rebuild France\u2019s ties with Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The summit that French President Emmanuel Macron convened in Kenya this week was supposed to be the hard launch of a new version of France in Africa.<\/p>\n

This France 2.0 wasn\u2019t just interested in its backyard \u2013 or le pr\u00e9-carr\u00e9 \u2013 of former French colonies. It wanted alliances continent-wide. This new France didn\u2019t wring its hands about the past. Instead, it was forward-looking, \u201centirely free of hang-ups,\u201d as Mr. Macron declared at the Africa Forward Summit\u2019s opening ceremony on Monday.<\/p>\n

The gathering was the first that France had ever convened in an anglophone African country, which \u201cspeaks volumes to the new approach France is taking towards Africa,\u201d says Nicasius Achu Check, an expert in France-Africa relations at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. As the summit finished on Tuesday, Mr. Macron announced that French and African companies had pledged to invest $27 billion on the continent in sectors ranging from energy to artificial intelligence. And on Wednesday, the French president traveled to Ethiopia for diplomatic meetings there.<\/p>\n

Why We Wrote This<\/p>\n

France is trying to bolster its fading influence in Africa, with promises of big investment and equal partnership. But its colonial history continues to create road bumps.<\/p>\n

But the Kenya summit also held reminders that the new France in Africa comes mingled with the old, such as when Mr. Macron barged on stage during a panel discussion, interrupting the presenter to shush chattering audience members. \u201cHey!\u201d the president shouted as he seized the mic from the emcee. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, guys, but … this is a total lack of respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Macron is known in France for often chiding the public, but as a video of this incident went viral, young, online Africans appeared to collectively wince. Was Mr. Macron really scolding his African counterparts like a school teacher, at an event meant to showcase their status as equal partners?<\/p>\n

For many observers, the incident called to mind exactly the uncomfortable history that Mr. Macron had hoped to sidestep, and underscored a larger truth about France\u2019s role in Africa: Mr. Macron had spent nearly a decade in office promising a \u201crefounded relationship\u201d with the continent. But in reality, Professor Check says, \u201cwe haven\u2019t seen much change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\/<\/p>\n

President Emmanuel Macron attends the final day of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, May 12, 2026.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA fraught relationship<\/p>\n

When Mr. Macron was elected in 2017, France\u2019s youngest-ever president quickly laid out a vision for a new kind of French comportement, or behavior, in Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am from a generation that does not come and tell Africa what to do,\u201d the then-39-year-old told an audience<\/a> of university students in Burkina Faso a few months after he took office. France\u2019s fraught and painful history in Africa, he declared, was no longer a place worth dwelling. \u201cOur duty is not to stay in this past but to wholeheartedly live this generation\u2019s adventure,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n

But for many in France\u2019s former African colonies, the image of a shared French-African \u201cadventure\u201d approached the farcical. For decades, their countries had been economically and politically tethered to France in ways that many felt left them fundamentally worse off.<\/p>\n

Simmering resentment over this unequal relationship, dubbed fran\u00e7afrique, broke into the open when a wave of coups swept across the Sahel in the early 2020s. The young military leaders who came to power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger made no secret of their disdain for France. They, along with Chad, soon booted out the French troops stationed inside their borders. The Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Senegal also requested the withdrawal of the French military.<\/p>\n

At times, Mr. Macron could not hide his bitterness. \u201cI think that they forgot to say \u2018thank you\u2019\u201d for France\u2019s military assistance, he complained<\/a> to a group of French ambassadors last year.<\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s president, Mahamat Idriss\u00a0D\u00e9by Itno, shot back, saying that Mr. Macron was \u201cliving in the wrong era,\u201d and that his comments \u201cborder on contempt for Africa and Africans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\/<\/p>\n

Chad President Mahamat Idriss D\u00e9by Itno, who has butted heads with French President Emmanuel Macron in the past, attends the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, May 12, 2026. <\/p>\n

All this meant that, by the time Mr. Macron arrived in Kenya this week, he was in damage-control mode, says Adekeye Adebajo, an international relations specialist and senior research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Macron\u2019s legacy<\/p>\n

Mr. Macron framed his overtures to the rest of Africa as a \u201cleap together\u201d into the future, and at the summit\u2019s opening on Monday, Kenyan President William Ruto saluted Mr. Macron for \u201chaving the courage to recalibrate the relationship between Africa and France.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Professor Adebajo sees a more pragmatic aim. With less than a year before the end of his second and final term, Mr. Macron is trying to salvage his administration\u2019s standing in Africa \u2013 as well as his own legacy as a progressive leader. \u201cHe\u2019s acting out of necessity but trying to sell it as something that is a strategy,\u201d says Mr. Adebajo.<\/p>\n

Yet, even as Mr. Macron attempts to secure his legacy, the French president is facing another uncomfortable truth: France matters less than it ever has in Africa.<\/p>\n

Across the continent, Paris is being elbowed out of the way economically and politically by ascendant powers such as China and Russia, even as it tries to cast itself as a more responsible partner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe paradox is that we are not the predators of this century,\u201d Mr. Macron told The Africa Report in an interview just before the summit. \u201cEuropeans may once have been. But they are not now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The summit that French President Emmanuel Macron convened in Kenya this week was supposed to be the hard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":{"0":"post-14980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-france"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}