Algeria: President Tebboune secretly receiving treatment in Germany

Residents living along the route between Ben-Aknoun, where the president lives, and El-Mouradia, where the presidential palace is located, noticed a total absence of presidential security, police and Civil Protection officers. Normally, on this route, between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m., cars are forbidden to park and pedestrians are forced to hurry. 

The Algerian press, which is usually prolix about the president's activities, no longer publishes pictures of him or reports on any of his activities. Even his absence from St Petersburg is passed over in silence.

Although he would have liked to participate in the Russian-African summit that opened on 27 July in St. Petersburg under the presidency of his "friend" Putin, the Algerian president was conspicuous by his absence, being represented by his prime minister, Aïmen Benabderrahmane.

The president's absence does not seem to be of much concern to Algerian public opinion. Algerians are not interested in the activities of a president they did not elect.

However, it has not escaped the attention of political observers that the head of state has given no sign of life at a time when the country is engulfed in deadly fires. This is what prompted us to question people close to the presidential circle, who told us that Abdelmadjid Tebboune is in Germany for treatment.

According to well-informed sources, the Algerian president was evacuated to Germany in the early evening of 22 July, the day he returned from Turkey.

Aged 78, a heavy smoker and in poor health, Abdelmadjid Tebboune struggled to cope with the trips that took him to Portugal, Russia and China in the space of a month. It was an exhausting and difficult trip to endure. For his visit to China, the Algerian president was invited to Doha on the outward journey and Istanbul on the return, only to make a 48-hour stopover in these two countries.

Although these stopovers were described as working visits by the Algerian side, there was nothing official from the Qatari and Turkish sides. Erdogan did not even send a minister to greet his Algerian counterpart. It was the former Turkish ambassador to Algiers who was called to greet Tebboune on his arrival and departure. Erdogan limited himself to offering him lunch the day after his arrival, and nothing more. No announcement of any major Turkish contracts or investment projects in Algeria. Unlike the Qataris, who gave their host the green light to invest in a steel complex in the Wilaya of Jijel and a high-speed TGV train linking Algiers to Tamanrasset over 2,000 km, 80 per cent of it in the desert. It is whimsical that Qatar thinks it is having fun throwing its money into the Algerian desert on a project that will not bring it a penny of profit. The same can be said of the Jijel steel complex. It is a stone's throw from the El-Hadjar complex in eastern Algeria. It will be just one more.

Despite these two stopovers, the Algerian president was seriously ill and his doctors decided to evacuate him to Germany as a matter of urgency. This evacuation was carried out in total secrecy so as not to arouse the ire of the Algerians, who suffer terribly from the catastrophic conditions in their country's health sector, which Tebboune is pleased to describe as the best in Africa and the Arab world.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who is ill with coronavirus, was transferred to a hospital in Cologne (Germany) on 28 October 2020, the day after spending a night in the military hospital in Algiers. The news was announced in a statement broadcast on national television. His hospitalisation came at a time when the constitutional reform he had proposed as soon as he was sworn in, on 19 December 2019, had been rejected on 1 November by three quarters of Algerians registered on the electoral roll.

He returned home on 29 December 2021 for a dozen days before returning to Germany on 10 January 2022 to undergo surgery on his foot.

All his transfers to Germany for treatment have been announced through official channels. This time, however, he was evacuated in the utmost secrecy, and to date not a word has been said about his medical stay in Germany.