Most Algerians boycotted last month’s presidential election, correctly perceiving it as a stage-managed farce. Five years after a protest movement forced Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down, the old guard has stifled the popular demand for democracy.
A woman looks at electoral posters of Algeria’s incumbent president and presidential candidate Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Oran, Algeria, on September 5, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)
Last month’s presidential election in Algeria culminated in yet another landslide victory for an incumbent head of state. The country’s predominantly young population, disillusioned with its political leadership, largely abstained, while opposition parties and media leveled charges of electoral fraud against the authorities. Critics of the ruling regime faced systematic intimidation in the run-up to the vote.
This year’s electoral outcome offers more evidence that the 2019 Hirak (“movement”) uprising has been effectively crushed by those in power. At that time, the bid of Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a fifth presidential term, even though he had been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 2013 and had barely been able to speak since then, triggered a nationwide popular revolt.
In April 2019, the military dropped its support for Bouteflika as the civilian figurehead of Algeria’s ruling class after six weeks of mass protests. The presidential elections scheduled for that month were ultimately postponed. However, Hirak protests continued unabated across Algeria, now feeding on their new key slogan “Yetnahaw Gaa” (“They all must go”).
The movement refused to accept only superficial changes among the top government personnel and continued to mobilize for real systemic change and an end to the clientelist rule of an elite backed by the police, the army, and the powerful intelligence service. Yet the military kept hold of power and enforced the appointment of ex–housing minister Abdelmadjid Tebboune as the new president in late 2019. The government then exploited the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to drive the Hirak off the streets for good.
More than five years after the revolt began, disillusionment has taken hold in Algeria. The partial freedoms in the public and political spheres that were hard won during the two decades of the Bouteflika era are being rolled back. Opposition parties and NGOs are banned, while dissidents and critics of the regime are intimidated or prosecuted. According to representatives of the National Committee for the Release of Prisoners, an activist network established in 2019 that now only sporadically appears in public, there are currently at least 225 prisoners of conscience behind bars across the country.
Algeria is once again governed by an opaque network of generals, parties, bureaucrats and business elites, and no one knows who is really pulling the strings. Economically, the country remains heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, which derive from an industry that provides very few jobs or prospects for young Algerians. Water cuts are as much a part of everyday life as housing shortages and sharp increases in the price of basic foodstuffs. Irregular migration across the Mediterranean toward Italy or Spain has once again turned into an ever-present reality and a beacon of hope for many.
A Badly Staged Play
Against this backdrop, the lack of interest by Algerian voters in this staged election was no surprise. The election campaign closely resembled those of the Bouteflika era, with rhetorical contortions from the three candidates allowed to run and a grotesque jumble of figures provided by Algeria’s electoral authority in the aftermath of the ballot.
Algeria is once again governed by an opaque network of generals, parties, bureaucrats, and business elites, and no one knows who is really pulling the strings.
Abdelmadjid Tebboune, running as a formally independent candidate, won the vote by a landslide. His opponents — Abdelaali Hassani Chérif from the moderate Islamist Movement for Society and Peace (MSP), and Youcef Aouchiche from the social democratic/reformist Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), which has its main support base in the Amazigh-Berber region of Kabylia — were simply there to provide a fig leaf to the voting process.
Several parties affiliated with or representing the Algerian elite backed Tebboune as the “consensus candidate.” After Bouteflika’s ouster, countless figures associated with his “presidential alliance” were arrested and frequently convicted on corruption charges. Yet the new leaders of the same parties now rallied behind Tebboune as the latest civilian front man of the ruling class.
The regime considered the level of voter turnout to be more important than the election result, as it would indicate how much toleration there is of the state’s current leadership in Algerian society. In order to encourage people to go the polls, Tebboune made big promises during the campaign, from fresh infrastructure projects to support programs for young entrepreneurs to increased social spending and 450,000 new jobs — though he gave no plausible explanation of how these jobs would be created.
Despite the absence of queues at polling stations, the election commission initially announced an “average” voter turnout of 48 percent. However, the actual number of votes confirmed by the election commission only corresponds to a turnout of 23 percent. There has been no explanation from the authorities for this discrepancy. According to preliminary results, Tebboune won the contest with 94.65 percent, yet the final results gave him a total of 84.3 percent. This election will surely go down in Algerian history books as yet another act in a badly staged theater play.
Unsurprisingly, Hassani Chérif accused the authorities of “election fraud” and “inflated results,” while Aouchiche called for an official investigation. In an unprecedented move, even the head of Tebboune’s campaign joined the wave of complaints, indirectly suggesting that Tebboune and his entourage had nothing to do with the fraud. According to a joint statement by the three candidates, the preliminary results were inaccurate, contradictory, ambiguous, and inconsistent.
Clampdown
In the run-up to the vote, reprisals against opposition activists and those who dared to criticize the president online or call for a boycott were a daily routine across the country. For instance, left-wing politician Fethi Ghares from the banned Democratic and Social Movement (MDS) was arrested (and later released) as were dozens of members of the Kabylia-based opposition party, Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD). A court even banned the popular left-wing opposition leader Karim Tabbou from making political statements on social media or taking part in public debates before the election.
In the run-up to the vote, reprisals against opposition activists and those who dared to criticize the president online or call for a boycott were a daily routine across the country.
Algerian NGOs and activists as well as international human rights groups launched a campaign in the preelection period about the situation in Algeria and the violations of international law by the authorities. For weeks, people involved in the campaign flooded social media with posts about political prisoners. They include figures such as Hirak activist Mohamed Tadjadit, who has been imprisoned several times since 2019, or Ihsane el-Kadi, director of the online media outlets Maghreb Emergent and Radio M. El-Kadi was arrested in December 2022 on dubious charges and remains behind bars to this day.
One of those organizations pushing the campaign forward was the French-based NGO Collective of the Families of the Disappeared in Algeria (CFDA), which represents more than five thousand families of people who were arrested during the bloody civil war of the 1990s and subsequently disappeared without trace. The Algerian authorities tolerated the organization’s activities for years, although it is one of the very few NGOs that continues to persistently demand investigations of enforced disappearances and the opaque events of the civil war, which is usually referred to in Algeria as the “black decade.”
Since the defeat of the Hirak and the accelerated crackdown on civil society that followed, however, groups like CFDA have much less space in which to operate, as its director, Nassera Dutour, explained:
In February 2024, we organized a seminar in Algiers, but the authorities cracked down on the event. Police showed up to conduct comprehensive ID checks of all participants. Given the sheer number of police officers deployed throughout the entire neighborhood, the whole thing felt like we were in a war zone.
There were no legal proceedings against the organizers nor participants, she notes: “It was all just harassment and the usual attempt to intimidate us.” In March, a CFDA film screening in Algiers was banned, and the police conducted similar ID checks of all those on the premises: “Even the cleaning lady had to spend two hours at a police station.”
Egyptianization
Such reprisals are once again part of everyday life in Algeria. The military and the intelligence service have reestablished a tight grip on power across the country. They have managed to restructure Algeria’s elite in the aftermath of the 2019 revolt, conducting a purge of its ranks without allowing the slightest trace of a progressive transformation, either politically or economically.
The military and the intelligence service have reestablished a tight grip on power across the country.
In the course of this purge, Bouteflika’s former allies in the military, the parties, and the state bureaucracy were arrested or driven into exile. But Tebboune and the military chief of staff, Saïd Chengriha, appointed amid the Hirak turmoil in late 2019, have since managed to calm down the power struggle between the regime’s various factions and significantly expanded the influence of the army over Algeria’s political sphere.
With Tebboune as the regime’s figurehead, the military budget has more than doubled from $10 billion in 2022 to $22 billion just two years later. A presidential decree passed in June 2024 allows serving military officers to take up positions in the civil service or state-owned companies. Generals and senior officers previously had privileged access to state coffers and could easily place relatives or associates in well-paid civil service positions, but they did not have direct control over state-owned enterprises. Military expert Akram Kharief, who works for the North African office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, has warned that we may be witnessing the “Egyptianization of Algeria,” in reference to the power and economic footprint of the Egyptian army in almost all sectors of Egypt’s economy.
Meanwhile, various forms of instability on Algeria’s borders are grist for the mill of the military’s modernization campaign, with its vast outlays on weaponry and other types of equipment. So far this year, we have seen bloody clashes between the Malian army, assisted by its allies from the Russian Wagner mercenary force, and the Tuareg rebels of the Azawad movement in Mali’s far north in the immediate proximity of the Algerian border, while Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) seized control of a region near the Algerian frontier shortly afterward. Algeria has so far supported the rival Libyan government headed by Haftar’s opponents in Tripoli and considers the LNA’s growing influence to be problematic at the very least.
In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assaults on Gaza and the West Bank, Algeria’s relations with its neighbor Morocco are also likely to remain tense. Rabat normalized its relations with Tel Aviv in 2020, in return for Israeli and US recognition of its neocolonial claim to Western Sahara, which the Moroccan army has occupied since 1975 in clear violation of international law.
A Rentier State
Tebboune and the elites who stand behind his rule have carried on a long tradition of Algerian leaders by calling for economic diversification and the creation of sustainable jobs in sectors other than oil and gas, while carrying out policies that are in contradiction with these statements. Under Tebboune, Algeria’s regime is once again pushing for an expansion of oil and gas exports, and thereby boosting an industry that hardly generates any jobs.
Algeria’s regime is once again pushing for an expansion of oil and gas exports, and thereby boosting an industry that hardly generates any jobs.
For the first time since the 2000s, energy companies from France, Italy, and the United States have reentered the Algerian market, by finalizing exploration and exploitation deals as well as maintenance contracts with the Algerian state-owned oil and gas giant Sonatrach. Algeria has also signed new supply arrangements for oil and gas with Germany, Czechia, Croatia, Brazil, and India.
The oil and gas industry is partly benefiting from Europe’s efforts to decrease its dependence on Russian gas, which has increased Algerian leverage in its relations with Western states. Algeria is today the second-biggest gas supplier for Europe after Norway. The government in Algiers is also expanding its investments in other extractive industries. By tapping into the vast phosphate reserves in Algeria’s eastern provinces, the regime attempts to further expand the foreign currency influx and thereby maintain the rentier-state model of the Algerian economy.
This approach will leave Algeria’s economy highly dependent on these sectors to generate foreign currency revenues and fund infrastructure projects as well as the import of consumer goods and maintenance of social expenditures. However, this is a strategy that leaves the population relying on the goodwill of the ruling class and its willingness to maintain welfare schemes.
So long as Algeria’s regime clings to the established economic model, nothing essential will change for the majority of the population.
The alternative to this rent-based economic model would be a far-reaching reform program seeking to diversify and industrialize the economy, creating jobs in industries other than oil and gas and tackling the structural deficit in Algeria’s balance of payments. The political establishment in Algiers has paid lip service to this vision for decades while continuing to prioritize short-term solutions in the classic manner of a rentier state. In doing so, it aims to sustain a fragile social peace by maintaining social expenditure and generating enough rent revenues to be distributed among influential elites.
Meanwhile, Algeria’s admission to the development bank of the BRICS alliance has now been approved. This does offer potential for the country to reduce its external dependence on Western states and could pave the way for more significant forms of cooperation with countries in the Global South. However, so long as Algeria’s regime clings to the established economic model, nothing essential will change for the majority of the population. With rampant, unchallenged clientelism on the part of state and military elites, most people in Algerian society will be left with crumbs from their table.
In view of these trends, more and more people are losing patience and seeking to emigrate, whether that means going to Europe, to other Arab and African countries, or (increasingly of late) to Russia. This phenomenon of migration is often referred to in Algeria as “harga,” Arabic for “burning,” in reference to the burning of borders. A popular slogan circulating on social media in the past years — “Plan A: Hirak, Plan B: Harga” — sums up this mood of pessimism about the prospects facing the country’s people.