Represented by the current president, Abdelmayid Tebboun, 78, the regime that has ruled Algeria since independence in 1962 is seeking to perpetuate its hold on power through the ballot box. With a technocratic profile within an apparatus under military supervision, Tebboun is challenged in Saturday’s presidential elections by an Islamist candidate and a socialist one. Neither of them threatens his re-election. Abstention, which exceeded 60% five years ago when he took office, is the main rival he faces to remain in office with legitimacy. After having stifled the demands of the Hirak, the pro-democracy movement that forced the fall of his predecessor, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, when he was seeking a fifth term after two decades in power, the Algerian president is now consolidating his position in a country “closely monitored and where criticism is not tolerated.”
Political observers who describe this scenario prefer to remain anonymous. They speak from Algiers, where the authorities have not allowed the EL PAÍS correspondent in the Maghreb and other European journalists to travel to cover the presidential elections. Facing Tebún and the regime that the army has been leading since the post-colonial era, Yucef Auchich is seeking to gather support for the historic Front of Socialist Forces in the upcoming legislative elections in the Berber region of Kabylia, where it competes with other nationalist forces. In statements to Efe, Auchich has promised to release “all political prisoners and prisoners of opinion in Algeria.” He has as little chance of fulfilling his commitment as he does of the moderate Islamist Abdelali Hassani, leader of the Movement of the Society for Peace, a party that is running in a presidential election for the first time after almost three decades of boycott, also with its sights set on the general elections as the second parliamentary force.
There is no real rival to Tebboun, who has had all the media of the state at his disposal for his campaign and who has not stopped announcing salary increases and an increase in unemployment benefits. The manna from the subsidies received by Algerians, who can obtain a low-cost social housing with little outlay, can mobilise a part of the apathetic voters in his favour. His main adversaries are abstention (which in the 2021 legislative elections reached almost 77% of the census), the boycott of the opposition and the disillusionment of citizens disappointed by the high cost of living, with inflation around 7%, and disappointed by the unfulfilled promises of reforms after the Hirak mobilisations.
“Tebboun’s record on the international and economic front is mediocre,” says an Algerian analyst, who also requests anonymity to avoid reprisals from the regime. The president seems to have left out of the campaign the setback suffered by Algeria in the dispute over Western Sahara, where Spain, in 2022, and France, this year, have aligned themselves with Morocco’s thesis of autonomy, under its own sovereignty, for the former Spanish colony. Algiers advocates a process of self-determination that leads to independence, in favour of its allies in the Polisario Front.
Following the break in diplomatic relations with Morocco in 2021, Algeria has also lost influence in the Sahel region, leaving a vacuum that has been quickly filled by Russia. Under its leadership, the largest Maghreb country has aligned itself with Moscow, its main military ally, and its partners in the BRICS, an organisation which, despite not having admitted Algeria into its fold, has just accepted the Maghreb country into the financial structure of its development bank.
“The economy continues to depend on hydrocarbon revenues in New Algeria” [tras la etapa de corrupción desmedida bajo Buteflika] “The country that Tebboun is demanding,” the same source stressed. The president proclaimed last week, in the final stretch of the electoral campaign, that Algeria is “the third largest economy in the world”, when it is only the third largest economy in Africa. But despite a 4% increase in gross domestic product in 2023 and a tripling of the value of gas sold to Europe between 2020 and 2022, the majority of Algerians can no longer afford to buy a car because of the devaluation of the dinar. On the black market in the streets of Algiers, the official exchange rate for the euro can be multiplied by 10. The gas boom does not hide shortages either, such as the supply of water to the population, in the midst of a prolonged drought in the Maghreb, which has sparked the first major popular protests since the crushing of the Hirak. At the beginning of June, hundreds of protesters cut roads and burned tires in the city of Tiaret, 250 kilometers southwest of Algiers. President Tebboun had promised his 200,000 inhabitants that water would flow from their taps on Eid al-Adha in the middle of that month, but the pipes were dry in the middle of the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
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The repression of the last embers of the 2019 revolt – in favour of “a civil, not military state” – has thrown dozens of opponents and dissidents behind bars, according to Amnesty International in its latest report. The pandemic interrupted the protests in 2020, and when they resumed the following year they were repressed under the accusation of “attacking institutions”.
Boycott the elections
Two of the forces that led the Hirak have turned their backs on the ballot. The Rally for Culture and Democracy, a key party in the Berber region of Kabylia (northeast of Algiers), faced with the “lack of confidence in an election that only seeks the survival of the rubble of the system.” The veteran leader of the Workers’ Party, Luisa Hanoun, who was imprisoned for her participation in the Hirak protests in 2019, also ruled out her candidacy for the presidency under “unfair and undemocratic” legal conditions. The lawyer for detainees in the popular protest movement and former judge Zubida Assul, was excluded by the electoral authorities from the race for the presidency.
A former head of government, several times minister, and the archetype of the post-colonial power apparatus, Tebboun has run for re-election backed by the army and by pro-government parties such as the historic National Liberation Front. In 2019 he won with 58% of the vote, but the turnout was the lowest in the country’s electoral history. Without warning, he brought forward the current presidential elections in order to try to demobilize his rivals in a campaign that has coincided with the North African heat wave and the summer holidays.
With the foreseeable re-election of Tebboun, the military-based political apparatus in power in Algeria will be consolidated after having been shaken by the outbreak of the popular mobilizations of the Hirak. As the French weekly Jeune Afrique pointed out, the current president “has eliminated the old regime” [de Buteflika]while reproducing almost the same model of governance.” The state of health of Tebboun, who will turn 80 in November next year, raises doubts. In 2020, he was hospitalized for several months in Germany due to a prolonged Covid infection.
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