Algeria’s constitutional court has approved five candidates to oppose Abdelaziz Bouteflika in next month’s presidential election – including the head of the Trotskyist workers’ party and a former prime minister – setting up an intriguing contest.
Mr Bouteflika, the 77-year-old incumbent, will be running again after more than 15 years in power, despite suffering a stroke last year. His erratic appearances in recent years – he has not been seen in public since his return from a Paris hospital last year – have generated serious doubts about his ability to seek out another five-year term.
Meanwhile, Abdelmalek Sellal has temporarily left behind his duties as Algeria’s prime minister to run the president’s election campaign.
Mr Sellal’s first speech on the campaign trail was littered with a string of interesting comparisons. “If the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, can run for a third term,” asked the former prime minister, “why should anybody oppose president Bouteflika’s fourth term?”
Other senior officials have also been fulsome in their support for the president, including the transport minister, who advised Air Algérie, Algeria’s national airline, to “give a one-way ticket, to the country of their choice, to those who do not back our candidate”.
Separately, the Algerian authorities have begun to crack down on those who do not back Mr Bouteflika and have targeted the Barakat movement, a loose group of academics, students, civil servants and journalists who are opposed to the president.
Barakat (“Enough” in the Algerian dialect) considers itself a peaceful opposition movement.
Its members recently organised protest rallies at the University of Algiers, where they waved banners and chanted anti-regime slogans in Arabic, French and Berber. The authorities subsequently arrested 260 Barakat members. Dr Amira Bouraoui, the group’s co-founder, has declared that “we will continue our fight against the election and the system”.
Despite Barakat’s relatively small membership and the opposition it faces, some observers believe it represents a significant development, stirring up comparisons with similar youth movements in Arab Spring countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.
In retaliation, thousands of students demonstrated their support for Mr Bouteflika in an arena in Algiers. Mr Sellal, who addressed the rally, described the Arab Spring as “a mosquito that should be eliminated with Fly-Tox”.
Many of those on the street watching the protest wondered whether Algeria needed any more “instability” drawing attention to the difficult and delicate situations that Egypt, Libya, and Syria are locked in.
Appearing to muzzle another potential dissenting voice, the Algerian authorities have shut down Al Atlas TV – an independent broadcaster known for its leanings towards Mr Bouteflika’s opponents – after police raided its headquarters and seized equipment.
The French government has called for the rights of the Algerian opposition to be upheld. Figures from secularist parties such as Rally for Culture and Democracy and the Islamist Movement for Peace and Society rallied in Algiers on March 21 and asked the people to boycott the election claiming that its result is predetermined.
Former president Liamine Zeroual thinks the ailing incumbent president should pull out from the upcoming election. In a long open letter to the Algerian people, Mr Zeroual describes the presidency as “a heavy and delicate task, both moral and physical”, comments that were seen as an allusion to Mr Bouteflika’s medical condition.
In a broadcast of a meeting Mr Bouteflika had last December with Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, the state controlled TV replayed the same footage over and over again, concentrating their coverage on a particular hand movement the president made, using multiple angles in an apparent attempt to validate both his fitness for office and his vigour.
Whatever the intentions of such coverage, it was hard to escape the feeling that it raised more questions than it answered about the president and his health.
Dr Abdelkader Cheref is a professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam
