France dreamed of €800M Saudi pledge to fund cultural projects. It ended up being a mirage.

PARIS — In the end, maybe the oasis was just a mirage.

It has been six years since Saudi Arabia and France agreed to a quid pro quo that would see Riyadh financially support French cultural heritage sites in exchange for Paris’ assistance transforming the Arabian oasis of AlUla into a tourist destination.

An early French proposal, drawn up before the deal was formally signed in 2018, speculated that the kingdom could invest as much as €1 billion in France. A report presented to the French Senate last month said the initial estimates amounted to closer to €800 million.

The amount of money on the table has since plummeted to €50 million, the report said.

POLITICO spoke with several of the deal’s interlocutors, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive topic that could affect Saudi-French relations. They said the commitments from the Saudis have in recent years gone back and forth, reaching as much as €200 million last year.

But a source in the French Ministry of Culture familiar with the talks said the French estimates were always “fanciful amounts” that were never validated by the Saudis.

“Our predecessors showed their naiveté,” the source said. “With the current price of a barrel of oil, even the Saudis, wealthy as they are, can no longer afford this.”

False start

No exact figures were revealed when French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman signed the pact in April 2018.

France agreed to help the Saudis develop AlUla, already a UNESCO world heritage site, into a major tourist destination that could rival Jordan’s Wadi Rum and its similarly stunning desert landscapes. The project is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy, an effort to diversify the country’s economy away from its dependence on oil revenues and forge a more open society.

French diplomats saw the agreement as win-win: a way to extend the country’s soft power through cultural diplomacy while also opening up possible new revenue streams for French businesses. They pointed to the Louvre Abu Dhabi as an example, a museum for which the Emiratis paid €400 million for the rights to use the Louvre name.

But the project was derailed shortly after the signing ceremony when the assassination of journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi sparked widespread outrage and renewed scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights.

In the fall 2019 issue of Politique Internationale magazine, the president of the French agency for the development of AlUla, Gérard Mestrallet, said he still hoped that the fund would be used “to finance civil works, ancient bridges, provincial castles or small churches which, unlike Notre-Dame, are not fortunate enough to mobilize donors.”

The years that followed were marked by intermittent periods of silence, repeated relaunches, slow-going negotiations and multiple downward revisions of the Saudis’ financial contribution.

“Everything has been done to ensure that this thing drags on and that the sum is reduced. Before, the Saudis might have wanted to please other countries, [but] they think today of themselves first,” the president of a French cultural establishment said.

Ministers cross the desert

French and Saudi negotiators finally met to once and for all agree to the terms and conditions of the agreement on January 31, 2022. Among those attending the meeting were Jean-Yves le Drian and Roselyne Bachelot, the foreign and cultural ministers at the time, respectively.

Then Le Drian’s successor, Catherine Colonna, visited Saudi Arabia in February 2023. Rima Abdul-Malak, who took over for Bachelot, traveled to the kingdom the following month.

Both failed to jumpstart talks.

One former stakeholder in the agreement said that in hindsight, it would’ve been better to structure the agreement in a way that would’ve forced the Saudis to honor their commitment.

Former Culture Minister Franck Riester, however, argued that just because a deal has not been finalized doesn’t mean the project has failed.

“It’s a long-term project, with interlocutors who are sometimes less mobilized and reactive,” he said. “That’s not, however, a sign of poorer performance.”

Macron’s planned visit to Saudi Arabia in the coming months has been described behind the scenes as the last chance to finalize the agreement and get a financial commitment from Riyadh.

On Friday, a delegation from the Royal Saudi Commission for AlUla will travel to Paris for a working meeting to be attended by Culture Minister Rachida Dati and Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

After France’s successful campaign to award Saudi Arabia the rights to host the 2030 World Expo, Dati appears to believe the time is right to deepen cooperation between the two countries. A source in the Ministry of Culture said Dati has identified about 20 possible investment opportunities for France.

But given the years of false starts in AlUla, it remains to be seen if these are concrete opportunities, or ones built on sand.

Paul de Villepin contributed to this report. This article was first published by POLITICO in French and was edited in English by Joshua Berlinger.