Algerian men walk in front of electoral posters for Ali Benflis on April 13, 2014. (FAROUK BATICHE/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]
Young Algerians were jumping for joy at the re-election of the 77-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a fourth term—or that is what a journalist on the widely viewed Ennahar TV channel told us. Citing a YouTube video of young Algerians dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” song—a global meme unconnected to politics that reached Algeria this spring—the Ennahar reporter apparently failed to notice the video had been posted in March, a full month before Algeria’s April 17 poll.
Alarmist news coverage—some of it carried by Ennahar—helped whip up anxiety on the eve of the April 17 poll. The channel featured, for example, an "urgent" news ticker running across the bottom of the screen reporting variously that arms were being brought in from Libya to destabilize the country and that the army might have to step in to block a plan to divide Algeria into four separatist regions—in all cases, without citing sources.
The reality of election day was far more mundane, and nobody jumped with surprise when official results gave Bouteflika almost 82 percent of the vote, with a turnout of around 52 percent. Young people were conspicuously absent from the polling booths, as they had been in the legislative elections of 2012. While many of Algeria’s young people had been politically active on social media, and even joining opposition movements such as Barakat, they simply didn’t bother to turn out for the polls.
So, if “jumping for joy” isn’t exactly an accurate description of Algerians’ feelings about their president, at least the palpable tension felt on the streets three years ago, when many Algerians feared an unpredictable spillover from the revolution in neighboring Tunisia, does appear to have eased. The authorities reacted to the events of 2011 with promises of political "reform," with economic measures that have had something of a trickle-down effect, and also—it could be argued—with a very gradual and limited increase in freedom of expression.
It is inconceivable, one commentator in Algiers told The Majalla, that someone would be arrested merely for expressing an opinion nowadays. But someone sticking their neck out in an act of real opposition—such as the largely middle-class activists of the small “Barakat” (Enough) movement that sprung up in opposition to the ailing president’s decision to seek a fourth term in office—might realistically fear losing their jobs, he said, especially if they worked in the public sector.
But now Ali Benflis, the leading opposition figure and former prime minister who stood unsuccessfully against Bouteflika in the elections, wants to harness that energy in a new political "formation" working towards a democratic transition. The transition they are working for should be "consensual, ordered and peaceful," he says. This choice of vocabulary suggests he may be looking to the Tunisian example, hoping to create real change through future elections.
If that is the case, he will need to persuade a skeptical younger generation for whom the electoral process lacks credibility, to say the least. After all, the Tunisian constituent assembly elections in October 2011 took place 10 months after the revolution amid a certain feel-good factor, and despite some flaws it was regarded as being largely free of fraud. Tunisians involved in organizing and observing the vote made an effort towards that outcome.
The Benflis camp ostensibly tried to create a similar aspiration for fraud-free elections among Algerians, promising it would have 16,000 observers at polling stations across the country on April 17. The reality was that, even in the capital, many of the rooms where voting took place had only one observer—from the Bouteflika camp. (Where there was an observer representing Benflis, it was sometimes an unenthusiastic young election boycotter earning some pocket money.)
Some Algerians looking ahead to a more democratic Algeria do credit Benflis with sincerity as a born-again democrat, despite his record of serving in previous Bouteflika governments and his role as a senior figure in a National Liberation Front (FLN). Indeed, his old ties to the ruling party have been working against him as he tries to coalesce the opposition into a unified front to work towards democracy in Algeria, with many other opposition leaders saying they need more information or more time before they join forces with him.
For Hugh Roberts, an Algeria expert at Tufts University in the United States, “The weakness of all the new talk of 'transition' is that nobody is defining the content or modalities, or even the desired destination.” It also doesn’t help that the authorities discourage the presence in Algiers of the kind of international NGOs—usually based in Europe or the US—that have offered advice on transitional processes elsewhere, notably in Tunisia.
But it may also be that, instead of a democratic transition being secured by a wide-ranging opposition coalition, the change Benflis is calling for could come from within the very halls of power. Writing in El-Watan newspaper, Algerian political scientist Rachid Grim depicted an ailing and depleted Bouteflika preparing the way for his successor. That successor would be chosen from a list of names that, he cynically writes, could include “Ali Benflis, who would thus be rewarded for completing his mission of lending credibility to the April 17 election.”
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
