In late July, in a letter celebrating the 25th anniversary of Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would execute an important shift in French policy toward the long-running dispute over Western Sahara. Not only would France support Morocco’s 2007 proposal offering limited self-governance to the region as the only realistic solution to the conflict, it would from now on effectively view the contested territory as part of Morocco.
Macron is just the latest Western leader to support Rabat’s position in the 50-year-old Western Sahara dispute, which has pitted indigenous aspirations for independence against Morocco’s assertion of historical title over the former Spanish colony it invaded in 1975 and has occupied ever since. He follows then-U.S. President Donald Trump in 2020 and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez two years ago in definitively backing Morocco’s “autonomy proposal” as the only way to end the conflict, rather than considering it one possible solution, as they had previously done through United Nations Security Council declarations.
The council is set to reexamine the issue in October, with some observers seemingly imagining that the chain reaction set off by Trump’s December 2020 proclamation, which recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat’s normalization of ties with Israel, will jumpstart the moribund Western Sahara peace process and move it in a new and more “realistic” direction. But for a number of reasons, little is likely to change as a result of these developments.