Morocco is increasingly a focus of European alliance-building and investment, including in illegally occupied Western Sahara. French president Emmanuel Macron is leading moves to normalize the colony, despite rulings by the EU’s own courts.
In November, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson traveled to the port city of Dakhla, on the West African coast, to launch his budget airline’s latest destination. On the runway, he posed for photos with Morocco’s tourist minister Fatima-Zahra Ammor and announced that Ryanair would run four weekly flights between the city and Spain. “Dakhla will become the thirteenth airport in Ryanair’s Moroccan network,” the company reported, insisting it was “looking forward to further developing Morocco’s infrastructure, connectivity, and tourism in the near future.”
Yet the fact that the CEO of Europe’s largest airline traveled three thousand miles to unveil just a handful of new flights — and that he was met by a government minister — suggests that this wasn’t a routine expansion of an existing market. Dakhla is not part of Morocco but is located in Western Sahara, a resource-rich country subject to a brutal Moroccan occupation. Denied independence in 1975 after former colonial power Spain carved up the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, Western Sahara is known as Africa’s last colony — that is, what the United Nations designates as a “non-self-governing territory.”
“These flights are a propaganda coup for the Moroccan government,” Sahrawi journalist Ahmed Ettanji tells Jacobin:
Ryanair is whitewashing the occupation of my country. It is playing into the narrative that Dakhla is a normal Moroccan holiday destination and obscuring the reality of a highly militarized city where Sahrawis protesting for their basic rights are being met by violent repression.
Yet with Morocco becoming a lucrative market for multinationals and a key ally in the European Union’s crackdown on irregular migration, the Moroccan government has made any openings for Western interests dependent on these types of actions, legitimizing its claim to Western Sahara. “This is Morocco’s one overriding policy priority at the moment,” Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me.
“If you are a European company and you want to operate in the country, it is clear the government will say ‘Okay, but you must also invest in Western Sahara,’” Lovatt explains in reference to Ryaniar’s move. “Similarly, Morocco’s key condition for signing trade agreements with the European Union has been the inclusion of Western Sahara within their scope.”
But even as Europe has moved to appease Moroccan authorities, such trade agreements have conflicted with EU courts’ own interpretation of international law. Only weeks before Ryanair’s announcement, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) made a landmark ruling that definitively blocked the inclusion of Western Sahara in EU-Moroccan agreements on fishing and agriculture, citing violations of the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination.
It was a major legal victory for the Sahrawi national liberation movement, known as Polisario Front, which successfully argued that as a third party subject to these trade deals, the people of Western Sahara had to give their explicit consent for them to be valid. Yet even after the CJEU ruling, European powers such as France and Spain have proven unwilling to change course, instead doubling down on prioritizing closer ties with Morocco over compliance with their legal obligations. Their actions once again highlight the EU’s highly selective defense of a rules-based international order.
Macron’s Erasure of Western Sahara
No one encapsulates this hypocrisy better than French president Emmanuel Macron, who last year broke with France’s decades-long neutral posture on the conflict over Western Sahara. This pivot culminated during a state visit to Morocco only weeks after the CJEU ruling last October, when he declared that “for France, this territory’s present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty.” Among NATO countries, only the United States during the first Trump administration had previously gone as far as to recognize Moroccan sovereignty — in that case, in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel.
Macron’s calculus was more complex. French foreign policy in North Africa has traditionally centered on balancing between two former colonies — Morocco and its regional rival Algeria, which is committed to Sahrawi independence. But after his allies’ disastrous performance in last summer’s parliamentary elections, and with the CJEU ruling on the horizon, Macron was convinced by business and diplomatic lobbying that closer alignment with Morocco would reap major economic and geopolitical benefits. This was a punt both on stemming the tide of Paris’s declining influence in the Sahel, after a series of client regimes had lost power in recent years, and to reassert France’s position as Morocco’s major economic partner amid greater competition from the likes of Spain and the United States.
The most immediate gains for recognizing Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara were for French business. Some forty corporate directors traveled with Macron to Moroccan capital Rabat to finalize commercial and investment agreements worth more than €10 billion. They included a €5 billion contract for MGH Energy for the construction of a massive green hydrogen plant near occupied Dakhla; a €3.5 billion agreement with ENGIE, also for renewable energy infrastructure; and a series of contracts related to the expansion of Morocco’s high-speed train network. Paris is also negotiating for a French role in Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative, which aims at providing landlocked countries in the Sahel with maritime access to the Atlantic Ocean via a new €1.3 billion port facility currently under construction in Dakhla (and set to be operational by 2028).
A report from the French Institute for International Relations and Strategy (IRIS) noted the “euphoria” generated by these investment prospects. Yet it added that “this must not conceal the legal reality of the territory of Western Sahara, and the risks this may entail for French companies” operating there “in a legal gray zone.”
The IRIS later took down the critical report from its website. But the wider issue it had raised still stands: uncertainty around the exact legal weight of Macron’s declaration recognizing Moroccan sovereignty. According to Lovatt, “There is a lot of constitutional confusion around it, and as court cases are brought relating to Western Sahara, it will be fascinating to see how the French legal system understands the territory’s status, particularly in the wake of the recent CJEU rulings.” He continues, “In the end, this goes to the question of whether a major EU member state like France can simply reject international law as it is understood by Europe’s highest court.”
The conflict between French interests and international law was underscored when France’s foreign ministry published its new official world map at the end of October, in which Western Sahara no longer appears as a separate territory. The country’s erasure happened despite the fact that CJEU had only just issued its judgment in which it quoted United Nations General Assembly resolutions on “the inalienable right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination and independence” and a 1975 International Court of Justice ruling that rejected Moroccan claims to sovereignty.
Settler Colonialism
“Every time that the Western Sahara issue is tested in some kind of legal forum, the answer is more or less predetermined: this is a non-self-governing territory and will remain so until there is an act of self-determination that is accepted by the international community,” comments Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University. “Yet Morocco feels ever more emboldened as it racks up political victories, with its lobbyists now arguing that recognition by two permanent members of the UN Security Council fundamentally alters the terms of the conflict,” he tells me.
For Mundy, this is a world away from the late 1990s when “it seemed like there would be a referendum on the territory’s future and that it would potentially be independent by the millennium.” When a fifteen-year war between Morocco and Polisario ended in stalemate in 1991, the Moroccan government agreed to a referendum on Sahrawi self-determination as part of the cease-fire deal. Yet attempts to organize such a vote in the initial years after the cease-fire were obstructed by Morocco’s attempts to rig the voting census to also include Moroccan settlers. Since King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne in 1999 and the successful independence referendum in East Timor the same year, the country has hardened its position against the holding of any such a plebiscite.
Instead, Morocco has sought to consolidate its occupation regime. In this respect, Mundy sees the Moroccan government as seeking “to create irreversible facts on the ground,” both through further settler colonialism and the “ever-greater infrastructural entanglement between Morocco and Western Sahara.” From the Moroccan leadership’s perspective, Sahrawi independence is made an increasingly unrealistic solution as it further develops the territory in conjunction with international investors — whether in terms of the massive green energy projects springing up across Western Sahara or the planned extension of the Moroccan high-speed train network to the Sahrawi capital El Aaiún, which a French consortium looks to be in pole position to secure.
Meanwhile, native Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation are subject to what Freedom House categorizes as among the least free political systems on the planet — where journalists, human rights activists, and pro-independence supporters face systematic repression. In its annual report for 2024, human rights NGO Codesa catalogued dozens of abuses carried out by Moroccan security forces. These included the repeated violent suppression of peaceful protests, the harassment and arbitrary detention of activists, and the suspicious deaths in custody of three Sahrawi civilians. In November 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the detentions of two dozen Sahrawi activists and journalists, held ever since the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010, were illegal. It also found that in the case of eighteen student activists detained in 2016, torture was used to extract confessions.
“In recent years, Morocco has also continued to bring in large numbers of settlers while advancing the expulsion and marginalization of native Sahrawis,” Ettanji explains. “These Moroccan settlers receive numerous advantages, from housing subsidies and tax breaks to access to the best jobs in the territory.” It is estimated that at least two-thirds of Western Sahara’s current population of 600,000 people are Moroccan settlers, whereas 173,000 Sahrawis remain stuck in refugee camps across the border in Algeria — the survivors and descendants of those forced to flee Morocco’s bombing campaign when it invaded the territory in 1975.
Impasse
Yet for Lovatt, the changed conditions on the ground cannot alter the “increasing legal constraints” that the EU now faces with respect to Western Sahara. Indeed, the European Commission now seems to have acknowledged the precedent set by last October’s ruling on the fisheries and agricultural agreements. On January 20, it announced that “in accordance with the case law” of the CJEU, it had informed European airlines that routes involving Western Sahara would no longer be covered by the terms of the EU-Moroccan aviation agreement — thus raising further doubts around the legal basis for the Spanish government’s authorization of Ryanair’s flights to and from Dakhla.
When contacted for comment, Ryanair’s press office insisted its “operations comply with all applicable aviation regulations.” Yet as the Western Sahara Research Watch (WSRW) notes, the commission’s statement now “indicates that there is no legal framework in place that covers EU airliners’ flights to Dakhla.” WSRW’s Erik Hagen points to the exceptional nature of this situation. “What it practically means that commercial flights take place to a territory that is not covered by an aviation agreement is still something we wish we had a good answer to,” he tells Jacobin. “Needless to say, any agreement that is signed with the Moroccan government is null and void, as this is not part of Morocco.”
Beyond that, Lovatt sees EU-Moroccan relations heading toward “a crunch point” next October when the period to renegotiate the status of Western Sahara in the trade liberalization agreement runs out. At that point, if the €600 million worth of yearly agricultural and fisheries exports from the occupied territories to the EU are not labeled as originating in Western Sahara, they will lose their preferential tariff status and become uncompetitive in European markets. There will also be other regulatory barriers for such exports. For example, Morocco will no longer be able to legally issue sanitary and food safety certificates that are valid in the EU for such products.
Labeling these products as from a separate territory not legally under its jurisdiction is unthinkable for Morocco’s authoritarian monarchy — just as it is accepting EU negotiations with Polisario over the terms for continuing such trade. Yet the loss of these exports would also represent a serious blow to the economic sustainability of its occupation regime, particularly until a greater number of green energy projects and the Dakhla port become operational.
In this context, Lovatt views the possibility of the EU “maintaining the status quo with Morocco” into the future as “unlikely to work.” “The EU could look to placate Morocco by offering it increased funding in certain areas or with member states making further symbolic gestures,” Lovatt continues. “Yet ultimately, Morocco’s uncompromising position on Western Sahara is still going to come up against the limits of EU law.” Polisario is now threatening to sue the EU for compensation for its past illegal trade with Morocco (which could run into the billions) and bring further legal cases, unless the commission opens up negotiations with it over Europe’s trade arrangements with the territory.
How the commission and member states ultimately navigate this legal and geopolitical impasse remains to be seen. For Mundy, “It still does not even occur to France and Spain to change direction and put pressure on Morocco over Western Sahara.” Spain’s militarized border regime along its vast southern frontier depends on cooperation with Morocco, with Pedro Sánchez’s center-left administration concerned that Mohammed VI’s government will move to again leverage irregular migration as a means to win concessions on Western Sahara.
Macron’s next move could be to open a French consulate in Dakhla, in a bid to outflank any diplomatic offensive from Donald Trump’s new administration. Notable in this respect was Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s holiday to Dakhla only three weeks after last November’s election.
“There was a concern in Paris last summer that if Trump won, Morocco would view the US as its preeminent international patron,” explains Mundy. “This could lead to certain special interests in France losing out unless it moved on Western Sahara before the floodgates opened on the US-Moroccan relationship,” he continues:
Given what has been going on in the Sahel, this was particularly crucial. Chad was the most recent domino to fall there in terms of evicting the French troops from its territory, but there was also Niger’s seizure of a key French-controlled uranium mine [this past] December.
In recent weeks, Macron has engaged in liberal grandstanding around the inviolability of international borders after Trump’s comments on a US takeover of Greenland. Since taking office in 2017, his presidency has been littered by homilies to multilateralism and the international rules-based order. Yet when it comes to defending the remnants of Françafrique, the mask slips.