Bouteflika to run for President again

Protesters turned out in their thousands across Algeria to denounce plans by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to seek a fifth term in office, as his campaign formally submitted the candidacy papers for April’s presidential election.

Background 

Algeria is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. The capital and most populous city is Algiers, located in the far north of the country on the Mediterranean coast. With an area of 2,381,741 square kilometres (919,595 sq mi), Algeria is the tenth-largest country in the world and the largest in Africa.

The country is a semi-presidential republic consisting of 48 provinces and 1,541 communes (counties). It has the highest Human development index of all non-island African countries. Algeria is a regional and middle power. It supplies large amounts of natural gas to Europe, and energy exports are the backbone of the economy. According to OPEC Algeria has the 16th largest oil reserves in the world and the second largest in Africa, while it has the 9th largest reserves of natural gas.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika is an Algerian politician who has been the fifth President of Algeria since 1999. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1963 to 1979. As President, he presided over the end of the bloody Algerian Civil War in 2002, and he ended emergency rule in February 2011 amidst regional unrest. 

On 10 February 2019, a press release signed by long-ailing Bouteflika announcing he would seek a fifth consecutive term in the upcoming 2019 Algerian presidential election provoked widespread discontent. People demanded his picture be removed from city halls in Kenchela and Annaba, protestors ripped down an image of him in Algiers. Protests were organized via social media in major and mid-sized cities on February 22. Those in Algiers, where street protests are illegal, were the biggest in nearly 18 years.

Analysis 

University students took to the streets in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, while protests were also reported in other cities. Algeria has been rocked by more than a week of unrest, with hundreds of thousands of people flooding streets in cities across the country on Friday amid a tight security presence.

In an effort to calm public anger, Mr Bouteflika promised in a written message to call a national conference immediately after his election to discuss and set a date for another poll in which he would not be a candidate.

“I have heard the pleas of protesters and especially thousands of young people who asked about our nation’s future,” he wrote in his message.

The president, who turned 82, is paralysed and has difficulty speaking. He has rarely been seen in public since he suffered a stroke in 2013. Many Algerians consider his candidacy an insult. The country’s opaque regime is anchored in the military.

The rare demonstrations in the country come as Mr Bouteflika is in hospital in Switzerland for “routine medical checks”.

Ali Benflis, a former prime minister who had earlier announced that he would be a candidate, said that he was pulling out. He described Mr Bouteflika’s candidacy as “a farce, a myth and surreal”. He said there were “non-constitutional forces” which had usurped the powers of the ailing president. He added that it was likely that Mr Bouteflika was “not even aware that he is a candidate”.

Algerians have also been angered by Ahmed Ouyahya, the prime minister, who seemed to mock rallies last week in which demonstrators handed flowers to policemen as a sign of their peacefulness. Mr Ouyahya suggested that the civil war in Syria had also “started with flowers”.

Mr Bouteflika has been in office since 1999 and many in the country credit him with restoring peace after a decade of fierce conflict between radical Islamists and the military, which cost an estimated 200,000 lives. The huge protests, however, suggest that an increasing number of Algerians reject political quiescence as the price of stability.

Assessment 

Our assessment is that Bouteflika’s decision to run for a record fifth term will only ignite the month-old protests in Algiers. We believe that Bouteflika is desperately hanging on to the office of the President and should reconsider his decision to run for President in favour of someone who is more in touch with the present generation in Algeria. 

 Image Courtesy: Magharebia (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Algériens_bravent_linterdiction_de_manifester_(5448166296).jpg), „Les Algériens bravent linterdiction de manifester (5448166296)“, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode