Algerian government fuels Morocco protests, reports say

Algerian media and officials continue their restrictions on mobilised protests in their own country as turmoil between Algeria and Morocco worsens through social media, according to Moroccan government-friendly outlet, The North Africa Post, 6th October.

Protests have been rife across Algeria recently due to factors such as poor public services and freedom of expression.

North Africa Post expressed a critical stance towards Algerian officials’ responses to these protests across the country, claiming that the country’s officials have attempted to frame demands for better public services as messages which go against the country’s constitutional foundations.

These responses to the protests in Algeria escalated as political actors were reported to have been posting inflammatory content on social media to digitally disrupt Morocco’s youth-led protests.

This can most explicitly be seen on 4th October, when the leader of the Islamist El Bina party, Abdelkader Bengrina, is said to have been posting on social media encouraging Moroccan protesters to “march on the royal palace” and “end normalisation.”

Bengrina, a close ally of Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was accused of capitalising on the violent turn the Moroccan protests have taken, inciting a shift in the framing of these protests from being about internal demands within the country itself to hyper-fixating on foreign policy issues relating to Israel and Palestine.

Unfortunately, Bengrina’s comments inciting more violent forms of protest on social media were said to have underestimated the peacefulness of the Moroccan protests, exhibiting a disconnect between the narrative he had created and the truth of the situation on the ground.

Reports state that Algeria’s authorities were restrictive in its policies and attitudes towards Palestinian protests, where as thousands of citizens in Morocco’s capital, Rabat, were found peacefully marching in the streets for Palestine. Furthermore, Gen-Z Moroccans were also found having peaceful sit-ins to peacefully protest for wider structural and systemic changes across the country.