Emmanuel Macron will soon find an old acquaintance: Ali Onaner, 47, has just been appointed Turkish Ambassador to Paris. The two men attended together the benches of the National School of Administration (ENA) from 2002 to 2004 in the Léopold-Sédar-Senghor promotion.
Perfect French-speaking – he obtained his baccalaureate at Charles-de-Gaulle high school in Ankara – Ali Onaner had been the Ambassador of the Turkish Republic in Tunis for two years, where he had a front row seat to observe the military intervention of his country in Libya, which he ardently defended in the Tunisian media. Ankara supported the government of Tripoli there, while France supported the other camp, that of the strongman of eastern Libya, Marshal Haftar.
Libya is just one of the many issues between Turkey and France and Ali Onaner will have a lot to do to relax bilateral relations, which were recently marked by insulting remarks that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reserved for its French counterpart. Erdogan questioned Emmanuel Macron’s “sanity” and said last week that he hoped France would “get rid of (him) as soon as possible”. The upcoming elections for the two heads of state – the presidential elections are scheduled for 2022 in France and 2023 in Turkey – should not help calm the bilateral climate.
Onaner is close to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mevlüt Cavusoglu, who was to speak on Tuesday by telephone with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian. Onaner was Cavusoglu’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2018. He knows France well since, in addition to the ENA, he was also, from 2012 to 2016, number two at the Turkish embassy in Paris. He previously headed the human rights department of his ministry in Ankara. This last expertise could be useful to him to explain to French public opinion the multiple violations of human rights committed by the Erdogan regime.
Onaner and Macron chatted on Twitter last September. The former encouraged whoever he calls “his school friend” to “move forward,” after the French president tweeted – in Turkish – a call for Turkey to open a dialogue ” well-intentioned, responsible, without naivety ”. Is Onaner’s appointment to Paris the first act of this new dialogue?
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