Diplomatically, the two countries share similar views on a number of issues.
Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune arrived in Qatar late on Saturday for a two-day “working visit”, the Algerian presidency said in a statement.
Qatar’s Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani received President Tebboune and his delegation as they arrival at the Amiri Terminal of Hamad International Airport, the Gulf state’s news agency (QNA) reported.
The Algerian leader’s visit comes just a month after a meeting with Qatar’s Father Amir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in Algiers, though no further details on that visit were disclosed at the time.
In November, Tebboune joined other world leaders in attending the opening ceremony of the 2022 FFIA World Cup in Qatar, the first to ever take place in the Arab and Muslim world.
Just weeks prior to that, Qatar’s amir was also in Algiers at the beginning of November for the Arab League summit – the only Gulf leader to attend the high-level meeting.
The meeting at the time took place as Algeria rallied to break the decades-long isolation of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad, though Damascus was only reinstated in the regional bloc in May of this year despite opposition from countries like Qatar.
The summit in 2022 came months after Algeria’s president visited Qatar in February for the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), in which Doha and Algiers inked two memoranda and an agreement for an executive programme.
One memorandum of understanding (MoU) pertained to the establishment of political consultations and coordination between Qatar and Algeria’s foreign ministries. The other MoU entailed cooperation in the field of social development and family between the Qatari and Algerian governments.
Qatar-Algeria ties
The Algerian president’s latest visit comes as Qatar and Algeria continue to expand bilateral ties.
Qatar and Algeria share a number of agreements and memoranda in the economic, trade, industry and energy sectors amongst others.
The Gulf state is the largest Arab investor in Algeria, accounting for 74% of all foreign investments. Such investments include the ‘Algerian Qatari Steel’ (AQS) project in the Bellara industrial zone in Jijel, northeast of Algiers.
The AQS project is worth approximately $2 billion and can produce five million tonnes of steel.
The Qatari-Algerian Business Council meeting in April in 2021, the first to take place, had further exhibited growing interest in bilateral trade.
Diplomatically, the two countries share similar views on a number of issues, most notably Palestine, with both Qatar and Algeria refusing to normalise with Israel and condemning its ongoing crimes against Palestinians.
The strength of ties were also displayed during the the 2017 GCC crisis, when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt imposed an illegal blockade on Qatar. At the time, Algeria was among a number of countries that refused to follow in the footsteps of the quartet and some of their Arab allies.
Meanwhile, Qatar had expressed its “deep regret” over the severing of ties between Algeria and Morocco in 2021 and called for the need to maintain channels of dialogue to resolve the diplomatic dispute. Algeria said at the time that it severed its ties with Morocco over “hostile actions” against it.
