The Polisario Front is facing renewed internal pressure after a report from UN Secretary-General António Guterres confirmed that its representatives took part in US-brokered talks in Madrid focused on the practical architecture of Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara.
According to details circulating this Friday, the Madrid discussions reportedly touched on highly specific elements: the creation of a transitional council, the sharing of the region’s natural resources, provisions for amnesty and reconciliation, and arrangements for disarmament. That level of detail stands in sharp contrast to the separatist movement’s long-standing public line, which has centered almost exclusively on demands for a self-determination referendum.
As anger spread inside the Tindouf camps over what many residents see as a quiet shift in position, Polisario’s New York representative, Sidi Mohamed Ammar, moved quickly to issue a statement insisting the Front would reject any negotiation that failed to guarantee the right to self-determination. Several observers, however, read the statement less as a policy reversal than as damage control, an attempt to regain command of a narrative that had slipped out of the leadership’s hands.
Criticism has reportedly surfaced even among figures close to Polisario leader Brahim Ghali, with some describing the Madrid engagement as a betrayal of the movement’s founding principles. Regional analysts take a different view, arguing that the string of recent New York meetings involving Mohamed Salem Ould Salek’s delegation point to a leadership that is, in practice, edging toward accepting a political settlement under Moroccan sovereignty, even as it keeps up a hardline public posture.
The episode lands at a moment when Morocco’s autonomy proposal continues to gain traction internationally, with a growing number of Western and African governments describing it as the only realistic and durable path out of the decades-old regional dispute. The Western Sahara file is expected to come back before the UN Security Council in the coming weeks, with diplomatic pressure building on both Algiers and the Polisario leadership.
For many observers watching both the diplomatic track and the situation on the ground, the gap between Polisario’s maximalist public rhetoric and the substance of what is reportedly being negotiated behind closed doors keeps widening, and it is becoming harder to keep that gap hidden from camp residents themselves.
