21.4%. This is the participation rate in the Algerian legislative elections on July 2, a record – the lowest in the country’s history, according to the official results announced Monday by Karim Khelfane, interim president of the Independent National Electoral Authority (Anie). Out of 24.7 million registered voters, only 5.16 million voters turned out and more than 920,000 ballots were deemed invalid.
Unsurprisingly, the election confirmed the domination of parties close to power: the National Liberation Front (FLN) came first with 90 seats out of 407, ahead of the National Democratic Rally (RND, 73 seats) and the El Moustakbal Front (59 seats). The Islamists of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP) collapsed, falling from 65 to 43 seats. As for the non-Islamist opposition, it is crushed: the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), the oldest opposition party in the country, only wins 12 seats – not enough to form a parliamentary group – while the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and the Workers’ Party are content with a few seats each.
“A vast farce”
The Algerian elections, both presidential and legislative, are “a vast farce”Xavier Driencourt explains to Tangwall Campagin. Twice French ambassador to Algiers, the diplomat tells us he attended several elections under Bouteflika, where the result was known in advance “through exchanges between different services”. The Hirak, a large pro-democracy movement which ousted the former president in 2019 after twenty years of ruthless reign, has not really reshuffled the cards, he laments. On the contrary. Feverish, the diet “leave no more room for chance”. At the head of the country, a “duet” the iron fist pulls the strings: Abdelmadjid Tebboune on one side, General Saïd Chengriha, chief of staff, on the other; the army monitoring a president “remote controlled”summarizes Xavier Driencourt.
As part of the July 2 election, the machine started well in advance of the vote. On March 25, a constitutional revision first clipped the wings of Anie, the Independent National Electoral Authority supposed to guarantee the independence of the process since its creation in September 2019 in the wake of Hirak, to wrest the organization of the polls from the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Its mission is now confined to simple supervision, with electoral logistics being transferred to the administration.
An unbreakable diet?
Simple supervision… which still allowed the institution to exclude 14 political parties deemed non-compliant and to invalidate, at the end of May, hundreds of candidacies on the basis of an article of law in the wording deemed deliberately vague by its detractors. The Front of Socialist Forces, cited by The Worlddenounced a “real political purge operation” ; the Rally for Culture and Democracy, for its part, described this major spring cleaning as “assumed political-administrative lock”.
Could a future burst like Hirak break the lock? Xavier Driencourt is categorical: he doesn’t see anything coming. This diet can “last 30 or 40 years”, carried by the support of the army, the emigration of the discontented towards Europe, and the complicit silence of Western chancelleries – France in the lead – who prefer, he accuses, an authoritarian regime in Algiers rather than instability 800 kilometers from Marseille.
