Paris (AFP)
Emmanuel Macron will travel from 20 to 22 December in Ivory Coast to celebrate the holiday season with the forces stationed in the country and strengthen bilateral relations, said Thursday the Elysee.
As he did in Niger in 2017, then in Chad in 2018, the Head of State will share a Christmas dinner on December 20 with the French forces present in Ivory Coast in the camp of Port-Bouet, near Abidjan.
Strengths of several hundred men, the French Forces in Ivory Coast (FFCI) represent the second advanced operational base in Africa, with that of Djibouti.
They took over the Licorne operation, whose mission was completed in January 2015.
On 21 and 22 December, the presidential visit will be devoted to bilateral relations around the themes of regional security and the fight against terrorism, with the jihadist threat from the Sahel, economic partnership, health and youth, Following the speech delivered by Emmanuel Macron in November 2017 in Ouagadougou, according to the Elysee.
The visit will be held in the run-up to the presidential election in 2020, which promises to be tense, ten years after the post-election crisis of 2010-2011, which left 3,000 dead.
President Alassane Ouattara, 77, has several times declared that a new political generation should assume power in Côte d'Ivoire, but he did not rule out representing himself in 2020, for a third term, if its historical rivals ex-presidents Henri Konan Bédié, 85, and Laurent Gbagbo, 74, also represented themselves.
© 2019 AFP