A once-celebrated media personality and political fixer, Mehdi Ghezzar now finds himself sidelined as Franco-Algerian tensions have taken on a new, harder edge
In an article for the French quarterly Revue XXI, Clément Fayol and Antoine Izambard discuss how, for years, Mehdi Ghezzar played many roles: talk show firebrand in France, presidential campaign manager for the winning candidate in the 2024 elections in Algeria, wealthy entrepreneur – the article begins in Ghezzar’s car repair shop on the outskirts of Paris, one of several businesses he owns – and self-declared emissary between the two deeply historically intertwined Mediterranean nations, former coloniser and former colonised, France and Algeria.
Born into Algeria’s elite and raised in proximity to power, Ghezzar fashioned himself as a cultural intermediary. But as the fault lines between Paris and Algiers hardened into espionage battles and the world changed, so did the stakes. Today, Ghezzar finds himself overwhelmed by a game far larger than his ambitions, caught between suspicion and irrelevance.
At the height of his visibility, Ghezzar was a household name on RMC’s talk show Les Grandes Gueules, crowned “Big Mouth of the Year” twice by popular vote. But his tenure on French airwaves ended abruptly in August 2024 after an inflammatory anti-Morocco remark on Algerian radio, at a time when France was courting Rabat. The fallout was swift: he lost his platform, just as the already fraught relationship between France and Algeria deteriorated into open hostility.
Still, Ghezzar sought to retain influence, recasting himself not only as a political player, but as a kind of freelance diplomat. He boasted ties to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, whose 2024 re-election he had helped secure. Draped in the Algerian flag and bolstered by a multi-million euro business portfolio in France, Ghezzar began mobilising what he called the “DZ lobby” (short for “dzayer”, the Arabic word for Algeria) – a media-savvy network of Algerian-French influencers he wished to create, made up of rappers, and reality TV stars. His goal was to shape Algeria’s international image, projecting a new kind of “soft power” far from the musty corridors of the FLN or the generals of the War of Independence.
But the geopolitical context shifted beneath his feet. In July 2024, France recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara – once a Spanish colony, long disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi Polisario movement backed by Algeria. For Algiers, Paris had crossed a red line. Algeria recalled its security officers from the multinational team in Paris responsible for preventing a terrorist attack on the Paris Olympic Games, diplomatic expulsions began, and a tit-for-tat war of accusation and counter-accusation began to take shape. Suddenly, Ghezzar’s influencer dinners and TikTok livestreams, once taken as kitschy symbols of diaspora pride, found themselves in the crosshairs of a full-blown trans-Mediterranean diplomatic crisis.
In the new political and geopolitical climate highlighted by the article, French counterintelligence began watching more closely. Reports surfaced that Ghezzar had become a “conduit” for Algerian influence, helping promote pro-regime narratives among the diaspora, even though officials also dismissed him as a “non-serious agitator” with no confirmed ties to state intelligence. For his part, Ghezzar denied all accusations, calling them “a pack of lies” and insisting he was simply a patriot “who loves both Algeria and France.”
But the soft diplomacy he hoped to revive, modelled on the informal negotiations once carried out by businessmen like Ali Haddad, a long-time backer of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has become impossible. Haddad himself was arrested on the Algerian-Tunisian border in 2019 and remains a cautionary tale for Algerian elites who once dared to straddle politics and business too freely. Meanwhile, the Algerian government has hardened and is cracking down on dissidents abroad.
Though he continues to speak of “media and political war” against the homeland, demanding the unity of the Algerian community in France in its defence, his audience has evaporated. Once poised to be a modern-day go-between, Ghezzar instead finds himself lost in a new age of digital surveillance, counterespionage and hardline nationalism on both shores.
The era of informal influencers and middlemen is fading fast. In its place is a much more perilous terrain, where patriotic rhetoric risks being weaponised and where even well-connected figures like Ghezzar are being sidelined. In the end, his story reveals more than personal ambition, it exposes the collapse of a once-flexible Franco-Algerian relationship into mistrust and manipulation.
Original article (“Entre Paris et Alger, le garagiste-diplomate dépassé par les espions”) by Clément Fayol and Antoine Izambard was published in French on 12 May 2025.
It is available here.
Revue XXI is a French quarterly magazine dedicated to long-form investigative journalism, blending reportage, narrative nonfiction and illustrated storytelling to explore global and local issues with depth and nuance.
