World Cup celebrations highlight political disenchantment in Algeria

05 August 2014

Algeria has maintained stability amid the turmoil of the past three years, but growing disenchantment with the government and questions over presidential succession leave the political direction of the country uncertain

The return of Algeria’s football team from Rio de Janeiro to Algiers on 2 July was met with crowds in the streets that drew comparisons in the press with independence day celebrations.

The team had enjoyed its best World Cup performance in the country’s history, qualifying for the knock-out stages of the competition for the first time, and running eventual winners Germany close in the second round. By comparison, the celebrations of Algeria’s actual independence day three days later were muted.

The stark contrast between the two days says much about popular disaffection with politics in the country, and the need to displace pent-up frustrations into anything else.

“The only good thing about Algeria at the moment was the World Cup,” says Azzedine Layachi, an Algerian political scientist at St John’s University in the US.

Although President Abdelaziz Bouteflika won a comfortable re-election victory on 17 April, with 81.5 per cent of votes cast for a candidate going his way, the turnout was just 51.7 per cent, and 9.6 per cent of votes were either blank or invalid. When spoiled votes and non-voters are taken into account, only 38 per cent of the electorate voted for the president.

Bouteflika’s health

That such a small proportion of the electorate voted for the incumbent leader, whose campaign received the full support of the country’s political machine and whose opponents were widely discredited even before the polls, speaks volumes for the deep-rooted disenchantment with Algeria’s political elite.

The choice of Bouteflika to stand as the regime’s candidate at the polls was itself concerning.

The 77-year-old president has suffered serious health problems since 2006, when he was treated in a Paris hospital for what was officially described as a stomach ulcer, but which was widely reported to have been cancer. In the summer before the elections, he spent two months in the same hospital having suffered a stroke. At the time, it was unclear whether he would ever return to head the government.

As it happened, Bouteflika did return to Algiers, and immediately reasserted his authority. In an apparent show of defiance by the president and his close allies, he reshuffled his cabinet and masterminded a reorganisation of the formidable state security service, the Departement Du Renseignment et de la Securite (DRS).

But despite such an ostentatious resumption of his powers, Bouteflika’s health has never recovered. The president is confined to a wheelchair, and public appearances are rare. He was unfit to run his own election campaign, and unable even to announce his own candidacy.

Succession

Such was the regime’s uncertainty over Bouteflika ahead of the elections that the announcement that he would run was made just days before the deadline for the registration of candidates.

But the critical question of who will succeed Bouteflika should he die, or should his health deteriorate to such an extent that he can no longer credibly stand even as a figurehead for the regime, remains unresolved.

Numerous possible candidates to succeed Bouteflika have been touted in recent years. Among those mentioned are a slew of senior figures from Bouteflika’s past three governments, including Ahmed Ouyahia, Abdelaziz Belkhadem and Abdelmalek Sellal.

All three have been prime ministers in Bouteflika’s governments, and Sellal is the current incumbent in the post. Sellal also ran the president’s recent election campaign, while Belkhadem is his personal representative and Ouyahia was chosen to chair a recent round of consultations on proposed amendments to Algeria’s constitution.

Military backing

But none has gained the confidence of the powerful military elite, which despite all the trappings of democracy still wields the greatest influence in the selection of Algeria’s presidents.

Ouyahia has ties with the military establishment, but is widely reviled by the public for his strong-arming of public sector workers while prime minister, and is not believed to be a suitable candidate. Belkhadem is also unpopular, and in early 2013, lost the backing of his own party – the Front de Liberation National (FLN) – and was forced to resign the leadership. Few believe Sellal has the stature or support to be the country’s next president.

The succession debate in recent months has focused less on these leading figures of the recent past and more on those whose pedigree was established in earlier years, among them Ali Benflis, Mouloud Hamrouche and Liamine Zeroual.

According to sources in Algiers, Benflis, a former FLN member who was prime minister from 2000-03, was discussed as a possible successor to Bouteflika during the president’s absence in 2013. But Benflis suffered a crushing defeat at the April presidential polls, when he won 12 per cent of the vote, a second humiliation after the late withdrawal of military support when he ran against Bouteflika in 2004, when he polled just 6 per cent.

After an absence from politics for 10 years, he has re-emerged as a prominent figure, but few believe he retains any credibility.

Candidates

Hamrouche, a former leading member of the FLN, was prime minister from 1989-91 and ran against Bouteflika in the 1999 presidential elections. Along with Benflis, he has been the most vocal of potential presidential successors in recent months, and is devoting his energies to winning friends on all sides.

Having clashed with the military in 1991, Hamrouche has been careful to underline the critical importance of the army to Algeria. He also dropped his proposed candidacy in the April elections when it was announced that Bouteflika would stand, instead joining those who called for a boycott of the elections. Since the elections, he has courted opposition support as well as holding discussions with senior regime figures behind the scenes.

Zeroual, an army general and former combatant in the fight against French rule, is perhaps best-placed of the more obvious candidates to succeed Bouteflika. Zeroual has been president before, between 1995-99, and in the context of Algerian political figures he is relatively popular. It is not clear, however, that the 73-year-old has any appetite to be president for a second time.

Hamrouche, then, seems for the time being at least to be the most likely man to succeed the president. But the failure of the shady cabal of key political figures that wields power behind the scenes to reach a consensus over a successor before the elections does not bode well. In backing Bouteflika for a fourth term, the regime has achieved nothing more than to postpone a decision that it is proving unwilling to make.

Fracture lines

In this climate of uncertainty, fractures are appearing across Algerian politics.

The run-up to the elections was marked by several protests against a fourth term for Bouteflika, orchestrated by a local civil society organisation known as Barakat (Enough). The protests have dwindled since the elections, but the movement is still calling for the removal of the president.

Opposition political parties have made some attempt to coordinate their efforts. A conference on 10 June brought together some 500 opposition politicians, including Benflis, Hamrouche and representatives of three moderate Islamist opposition parties and two parties drawing support from the marginalised Kabylie region of northeast Algeria. But the parties have no united agenda and were unable to cooperate before the elections when it mattered most.

Long-running divisions within the main establishment party, the FLN, have also come to the fore in recent weeks. When supporters of ousted leader Belkhadem were prevented from entering the party’s central committee meeting in late June, the result was a fist fight between loyalists of Belkhadem and those of the party’s leader, Amar Saadani.

“The appearance of splits within the regime is unprecedented in Algeria’s history,” says Issandr el-Amrani, project director for North Africa at the Belgium-headquartered International Crisis Group.

Reform programme

The regime is meanwhile seeking to paper over the growing cracks with a programme of constitutional reform.

The government has held talks with dozens of political parties, organisations and individuals over a set of proposals that includes the reimposition of a two-term limit to presidential mandates, which was removed in 2008, and the addition of the right to peaceful protest and guarantees of a free press.

There is scepticism that these new rights will change common practice in a country where the right to protest has always been proscribed by the police and military and the press routinely self-censors on matters of politics and national security issues. The talks have been boycotted by most opposition political parties, all but guaranteeing that their voices, weak as they are, will not be heard.

Amid the turmoil of elite politics, the regime has focused on promoting the idea of stability. This was the repeated mantra of the government’s representatives in the presidential election campaign, and it has continued to be so in the aftermath of Bouteflika’s re-election.

Ossifying regime

Among the proposed additions to the constitution is a new clause that enshrines the notion of national reconciliation, building on the referendum in 2005 that sought to consign to the past the country’s bloody decade of civil war in the 1990s.

In the context of the devastation and turbulence that in recent years has blighted attempts to foment political change elsewhere in the region, from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Egypt, Algeria remains relatively stable.

For many in Algeria, a return to conflict remains the greatest fear, and this has led to a degree of acquiescence in an ossifying regime. “The system is not totally broken, so it hasn’t been possible to generate momentum for revolutionary change,” says Layachi.

The downside, however, is that few Algerians feel genuinely represented by a government that is widely viewed as self-serving and dismissive of the public interest. With such disaffection and uncertainty as to the future, there is little surprise that they seek their joy in football.

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