Ever since January 2011, when Algerians took to the streets to protest their economic plight and demonstrate their political frustration alongside their neighbours in Tunisia and Egypt, the government has promised political change. But no matter how many new measures are introduced, there is little sign of any real progress.

“No steps have been taken to improve the enjoyment of public freedoms, particularly the right to protest”

Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network report

Following months of talks with opposition figures and civil society members during 2011, the government has introduced new rules on political parties, media freedoms, the right of association and female representation in parliament. The state of emergency, in place for more than two decades, has also been lifted. The next step involves drawing up a new constitution, which the government promises will redefine the political landscape.

Yet, despite the reform programme being so wide-ranging on paper, the authorities have ensured at every stage that the impact on the ground has been negligible.

Restrictive laws

The lifting of the state of emergency was accompanied by new measures that empower the police to intervene in the most vaguely defined circumstances. A 2001 law prohibiting public gatherings in Algiers was also retained. On 12 February 2011, just nine days after the government announced it would lift the emergency laws, the few hundred protesters, who turned out in the capital in support of political change, were met with a police response numbering more than 30,000 personnel, according to media reports.

“No steps have been taken or debated to improve the enjoyment of public freedoms, particularly the right to protest or assemble in a public place,” states a report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, published in December 2011. “On the contrary, these activities are prohibited by law in Algiers, and in practice everywhere else in the country.”

“Most striking of all is the failure of the new political parties law to affect the make-up of the lower house”

The media law that was introduced in January, and was supposed to increase press freedoms, allows for journalists in breach of its dictates to face fines of up to AD500,000 ($6,143) - about double the average annual wage of Algerian nationals and three times the annual minimum wage. If journalists are unable to pay the fine, they face imprisonment. The government has lifted the state monopoly on broadcast media, bringing the sector into line with a relatively robust independent print media. But all journalists are still subject to wide-ranging restrictions on what they can say.

According to the new media law, journalists must respect “the Islamic faith and all religions, national identity and cultural values of society, economic interests” and, in what allows for the widest of interpretations, “national sovereignty and unity and the requirements of public order”. In June, two Algerian journalists were sentenced to two months in prison on libel charges. The sentences are inconsistent with the new media law and should be overturned on appeal, according to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Political deadlock

Most striking of all has been the failure of the new political parties law to make any impression on the make-up of the Assemblee Populaire Nationale (APN), the lower house of Algeria’s parliament. The law allowed for the authorisation of the first new political parties since Abdelaziz Bouteflika became president in 1999. Although the task of authorising the parties was controversially given to the Interior Ministry, some 20 new parties were given the green light to hold constituent assemblies and contest the 10 May parliamentary elections.

The results of the elections made a mockery of the new measures. In the lead-up to the polls, the largest party in the APN, the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) - once the country’s only legal party - was suffering from a deep internal split, prompted by calls from certain party members for the resignation of their leader, Abdelaziz Belkhadem. Despite this, the proliferation of new parties and the climate of political change elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa region, the FLN actually increased its share of the seats in the APN to 47.6 per cent, from 35 per cent in 2007.

The next largest party in the chamber, the Rassemblement National Democratique (RND), led by Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, also faced a string of resignations ahead of the elections. But it too managed to maintain its share of the APN, winning 15.2 per cent of seats, compared with 15.7 per cent in 2007. Between them, the FLN and the RND - the two parties of the governing alliance - won 291 seats in the newly expanded 462-seat lower house.

Although the number of female members increased from 30 to 145, the plethora of new parties barely registered in the results. Most surprising was the poor performance of moderate Islamist parties, including the Alliance Algerie Verte (Green Algeria Alliance) - a bloc composed of Ennahda, El-Islah and Mouvement de la Societe pour la Paix (MSP), which quit the ruling alliance in 2011 - and a new party, the Front pour la Justice et le Developpement (FJP).

Ahead of the polls, the Green Alliance and the FJP were both tipped to do well. FJP leader Abdallah Djaballah and Bouguerra Soltani, the head of the MSP, claimed that their respective groups would win the elections, assuming they were free and fair. In the event, the alliance won just 10.2 per cent of the seats, while the FJP won only seven seats, equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the total. The MSP alone won 13.4 per cent of the seats in 2007.

Questionable results

Several explanations have been offered for the election results. Although the polls were declared broadly free and fair by international election monitors, there were reservations about the way in which the vote was conducted.

In particular, independent observers and opposition politicians complained that they were not given access to national voter lists, to which more than 3 million names had been added since 2007. The president of the national monitoring commission, composed of local political party members and civil society representatives, expressed surprise that the Interior Ministry announced the election results before the final figures were in for many of the country’s constituencies.

Other, less sinister factors might also help to explain the result. For one, President Bouteflika turned the elections into a vote of confidence not only in himself as president, but also in the very identity of the nation. The polls were an opportunity for Algeria to differentiate itself from the violence and instability that were engulfing neighbouring nations, said Bouteflika in a speech on 8 May, just two days before the election

While there was certainly a segment of the population that would like to have followed in the footsteps of Algeria’s neighbours, this is an argument that may have had broad appeal. At least 200,000 people died in the civil war that followed the abandoning of elections, which the Islamists were poised to win, after the first round of voting in late 1991. There is little appetite in Algeria now for another bloody confrontation.

Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the electoral system in the country inherently favours large parties over small ones: there is no proportional representation of those groups that win only a small percentage of the vote. As a consequence, the authorisation of so many new parties actually made opposition groups less likely to win seats than before. Only half of the parties fielding candidates in the elections returned a seat, while the fragmentation of the vote between the many new parties made it easier for the more established ones to come out ahead on a constituency level. The FLN and RND won almost two-thirds of the seats in the APN with less than 20 per cent of the popular vote.

A notable aspect of the election results was the level of disaffection among the voting public. There was a concerted campaign by the Berber-dominated Front des Forces Socialistes party, along with youth groups and former members of the banned Front Islamique du Salut, to boycott the elections, and this may also have affected the performance of opposition parties.

Although the official turnout was 43 per cent, up from an all-time low of 35 per cent in 2007, 18 per cent of the ballots were spoiled, meaning that only 35 per cent of the electorate cast a vote for a candidate. If votes for parties that failed to return a single seat are excluded, the figure falls to just 29 per cent.

Centralised decision-making

The government’s meek scheme of political reform offers little hope that the level of engagement of Algerians in national politics is likely to increase in the future. The planned programme of constitutional change is unlikely to have any impact.

Little is known about the programme, but analysts predict that the maximum number of presidential terms may be reduced to two, having been increased to three in late 2008 to enable President Bouteflika to stand for another term in the April 2009 elections. But the concentration of power in the office of the president is likely to be increased rather than diluted as Algeria moves away from a French presidential model and towards a US model.

Despite all this, there is little threat of serious political instability in Algeria in the medium term. The government has almost $200bn in foreign currency reserves at its disposal, enabling it to continue its policy of buying off social discontent by increasing government wages and subsidies on basic products. There is little in the way of organised political opposition, little popular appetite for a revolution, and the security services maintain an iron grip.

The one risk no one can quantify is what will happen when President Bouteflika either dies or chooses to step down. The president has been in poor health for several years and few expect him to stand for re-election in 2014. The problem is, there are few candidates to replace him, and none of them is popular.