Marrakech – The Algiers handshake was supposed to pay off this month. Instead, Pedro Sánchez has left Abdelmadjid Tebboune staring at an empty calendar.
Spain’s prime minister has unilaterally postponed the high-level summit with Algeria scheduled for October 20 and 21 in Madrid, according to a report published this Friday by the Spanish outlet The Objective. Diplomatic sources told the paper that Madrid notified Algiers in the final hours before the event, just as every official preparation was in motion.
The Reunión de Alto Nivel now stands suspended sine die. For Algiers, that phrasing lands like a demotion. The meeting was meant to seat Sánchez and Tebboune at the same table on October 20, then widen the next day into a business forum and a round of joint official activities.
Algeria had treated the prospect as a coronation. Its official and media channels built a communications campaign around the summit, branding it a historic “reconciliation” and a sign that Madrid had come to repent after years of frozen ties. The regime wanted the region to read it as Algeria’s return to the Mediterranean chessboard. The empty chair tells a different story.
To measure the fall, one has to recall the climb. The rupture erupted in March 2022, when Spain endorsed Morocco’s Autonomy Plan for the Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty, calling it the “most serious, credible and realistic” basis for a settlement.
Algiers answered with fury, recalling its ambassador, decreeing a commercial blockade, and suspending its friendship treaty with Spain. Realpolitik and economic pain did the rest. Algeria deflated, conceded everything to reopen the line to Madrid, and watched the Spanish position on the Moroccan Sahara stay exactly where it was.
The July thaw had seemed to seal the retreat. Sánchez flew to Algiers on July 20 to meet Tebboune and formalize the resumption of relations, the first such reset since the April 2018 summit under Mariano Rajoy, when Spain also locked in a deal to raise Algerian gas imports.
Two pressures unraveled it. The first is Morocco. The Spanish royal couple, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, is due to visit occupied Ceuta and Melilla on October 13 and 14, and pairing that trip with an Algeria reconciliation summit days later would have handed Rabat a double snub inside a single week.
The sources point to the risk of retaliation: Morocco could withdraw its ambassador, Karima Benyaich, as it did in 2007 during the royal visit under Juan Carlos I. Sánchez would then face two hostile neighbors at once, a bind with almost no precedent in Spanish diplomacy.
The deeper detonator carries a name: Ayoub Aïssiou. The Algerian entrepreneur and opposition figure, ranked by Tebboune’s regime as its most wanted man abroad, walked out of Brians prison on September 4 after 41 days inside.
The Audiencia Nacional granted provisional release once the prosecution reversed its own August 14 demand to keep him jailed, leaving him under a withdrawn passport, a ban on leaving Spain, and fortnightly court appearances, but no extradition. In Algiers, the ruling fell like a bomb.
Aïssiou once commanded one of Algeria’s largest business empires, a conglomerate he says employed around 3,000 people across pharmaceuticals, construction, food, livestock, chocolate and biscuit manufacturing, plastics, and the representation of major European brand franchises.
His main instrument of influence was El Djazairia One, one of the country’s leading private television channels, whose digital platforms now draw some 200 million views a month.
He ties that reach to his persecution, arguing Tebboune fears his weight before the 2029 election. Asked by The Objective whether he might run, he left the door open: “Why not?”
He had also forecast the storm. Warning that the fallout of his freedom was “unpredictable,” Aïssiou feared for his life and his family, whose ordeal already reaches his father-in-law, former senator Bachir Ould Zemirli, serving seven years in an Algerian cell. His prediction has arrived early.
