Abdelmayid Tebboun will be 80 in 2025, and will probably still be living in the Al Muradia palace in Algiers, the seat of the presidency. A former head of government, several times a minister, the archetype of the power apparatus that has governed the Maghreb country since its independence in 1962, he took over the leadership of the state five years ago with the commitment to remain at the head of the country for only one term, as he made it clear, to guide an orderly transition to democracy. Amid the echo of the demands for a massive peaceful revolt, Algeria seemed to be changing, but in the end everything has remained the same.
The president succeeded the octogenarian Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the last leader of the era of the war against French colonial power, who governed for two decades marked by corruption. When he was seeking a fifth consecutive term, despite being seriously ill and absent from public life, the popular uprising of the Hirak (movement, in Arabic) forced him to withdraw from the elections.
Backed by the army and the ruling parties, Tebboun then ran for president with a programme of clean hands and the promise of listening to the demands for the rule of law and freedoms chanted every week by millions of demonstrators in the streets of Algeria. He won with 58% of the votes, but the turnout was only 39%, the lowest in the electoral history of the country. Last Thursday, just hours before the legal deadline expired, he presented his candidacy for re-election, so that he could finish the work he had started, he claimed. He himself had brought forward the presidential elections to 7 September, in a campaign that coincides with the North African heat wave and the summer holidays.
The Constitutional Court is due to announce this week the candidates who aspire to challenge him after examining whether they meet the legal requirements, but at least two of the forces that led the Hirak have already turned their backs on the ballot. Athman Mazuz, president of the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD, in its French acronym), has announced the electoral boycott by the key party in the Berber region of Kabylia (northeast of Algiers). The “lack of confidence in the elections, which only seek the survival of the rubble of the system” is the reason given by the RCD. “These elections are of no interest to the vast majority of citizens,” the organisation said in a statement: “The campaign is taking place amidst repression of the opposition and a lead curtain on the media.”
At the head of the radical left, veteran Workers’ Party leader Luisa Hanoun has also ruled out her candidacy for the presidency on social media, citing legal conditions she describes as “unfair and undemocratic.” She believes the current campaign imposes the most restrictions since 1999, when Bouteflika was first elected after the other candidates withdrew on the eve of the vote.
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Hanoun was imprisoned for her participation in the Hirak protests in 2019. From the centre-left, the lawyer for those arrested in the popular protests and former judge Zubida Assul confirms that she is staying in the electoral race for now. “We are waiting for the Constitutional Court to validate our candidacy. If not, we will act accordingly,” in an allusion to the boycott of the polls, warns a person in charge of her campaign from Algiers.
Tebboun’s re-election will confirm that the military-based political apparatus in power in Algeria has consolidated itself after being shaken by the outbreak of popular protests that ousted Bouteflika from power, according to the main Algerian opposition forces. As the French weekly highlights Young Africa“Tebbun has eliminated the old regime [de Buteflika]whose consequences it has inherited, while reproducing almost the same model of governance.”
The outgoing president declared five years ago that he had no intention of “staying in power forever”. He now hopes to remain in office at least until he is 84, although his advanced age and state of health raise questions. In 2020, he was hospitalised for several months in Germany due to a prolonged Covid infection.
Those who have decided to stand up to Tebboun and the regime under permanent military tutelage that has controlled post-colonial Algeria for more than six decades, although with little chance at the polls, are the socialist Yucef Auchich, and the moderate Islamist Abdelali Hassani Cherif. The first is seeking to gather support for the historic Front of Socialist Forces in the upcoming legislative elections in the Berber region of Kabylia, where he competes directly with the RCD. The second is the leader of the Movement of the Society for Peace, a party that has orbited around power since the end of the civil war between the army and Islamic fundamentalist groups, which bled Algeria dry during the last decade of the 20th century with more than 100,000 dead.
There is no potential rival for Tebboun. His main adversaries will be abstention, opposition boycotts and the disillusionment of citizens disappointed by unfulfilled promises of reforms following the massive Hirak mobilisations. The repression of the last embers of the 2019 revolt – in favour of a “free and democratic Algeria” and for “a civil, not a 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”.
The current president has the support of the army, represented by the chief of staff, General Said Chengriha. In one of his last presidential decrees before confirming that he was running for re-election, Tebboun has authorized career military officers to occupy executive management positions in the civil administration, in areas considered “strategic and sensitive for security”, a measure that has been described by the opposition as a step towards the militarization of the State.
Promise to double wages
In a thinly veiled campaign programme, Tebboun has promised to double wages by 2026-2027 and increase GDP by 60% by that time thanks to the boom in natural gas export revenues caused by the war in Ukraine. Algeria is set to double its production by 2022 in the face of a European ban on imports from Russia, Reuters reports.
In 2023, the Maghreb country supplied 19% of the natural gas exported by pipeline to the EU, second only to Norway (54%) and ahead of Russia (17%). In Spain, 29.2% of imported gas was of Algerian origin. Public spending, however, has skyrocketed and almost doubled, to a 9% budget deficit, according to World Bank data. The model of a protective state, which distributes the profits from hydrocarbons among the population, implemented since independence from France, has been reinforced by rising gas export prices following the war in Ukraine.
Algeria, however, is approaching 50 million inhabitants, according to recent demographic projections, and although agriculture has expanded in the last two decades, it needs to import half of the food it consumes, including cereals. The gas boom does not hide shortages, such as the lack of water supplies to the population, amid a prolonged drought in the Maghreb, which has sparked the first major popular protests since the crushing of the Hirak.
Last June, hundreds of protesters blocked roads and burned tyres in the town of Tiaret, 250 kilometres southwest of Algiers. President Tebboun had promised the 200,000 inhabitants that water would flow from their taps by Eid al-Adha in the middle of last month, but the pipes were dry during the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
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