The results of Algeria's parliament elections last week proved that the rules of the state-controlled game remain unchanged, writes Hugh Roberts Click to view caption The results of Algeria's legislative elections on 30 May exhibit three main features. First there is the victory of the National Liberation Front (FLN), which has a slender overall majority with 199 of the 389 seats in the new National Assembly. Second, the Islamist presence in the Assembly has fallen by a fifth and the pecking order of the three Islamist parties has been modified, with Abdullah Djaballah's Movement for National Reform (MRN) overtaking Mahfoud Nahnah's Movement of Society for Peace (MSP) and almost wiping out Lahbib Adami's Nahda Movement (MN). Finally, with the parties based on the Berbers of Kabylia boycotting the election, the leadership of the "secular democratic" trend has passed to the Workers' Party (PT), led by Louisa Hanoune. Western media commentary has focused on the negative side of the elections, however. Apart from a non-committal comment by the US State Department welcoming the elections, the consensus of international opinion is that the elections have reflected badly on the Algerian authorities. With turn-out at just over 46 per cent -- the lowest since Independence -- and polling largely prevented in Kabylia, the regime has derived little credit from the event. But the authorities are probably indifferent to outside commentary on such matters. The government has secured an Association Agreement with the European Union, the army enjoys thriving relations with its counterparts in the USA and numerous other countries as well as NATO, while France and other commercial partners are more interested in seizing economic opportunities than scoring political points. These circumstances have left the regime free to conduct the elections as it wished, and it has reason to be satisfied with the outcome, which it has largely engineered. The critics' point is that "elections" in Algeria are not really elections, because the main results are determined in advance by the regime's "decision-makers" themselves. The people vote, but they do not elect their representatives. The votes of the electorate are treated by the regime as raw material, to be refined if need be before the results are published. The operative principle is that the rulers decide who should represent the people, and the people ratify their choices. In order to understand the significance of the outcome, therefore, we need to grasp the logic behind the regime's calculations. The pluralism which has developed in Algeria since 1989 has been ideological rather than political. Parties are based on competing worldviews rather than competing programmes for government. These ideological divisions have been a major premise of the violence which has ravaged the country over the last decade, but their advantage to the regime is that none of the parties which have sprung up has ever canvassed a set of serious policies -- as distinct from constitutional schemes and utopian visions -- and so none of them has ever been able to pose as a convincing alternative government. Since organising a return to electoral politics in 1997, the regime has ensured that the main ideological tendencies -- nationalist, Islamist and secular-democratic -- are all represented in the National Assembly and ideally in the government itself. At the same time, it has been determined to prevent any political party from acquiring too much weight, and has accordingly arranged for each tendency to be represented by at least two parties. Thus there are the two "nationalist" parties, the FLN and the Democratic National Rally (RND), three Islamist parties (MSP, MRN and MN), two parties based on the Berbers of Kabylia (the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), and the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD)) and two parties of the Left (the PT and the small but formerly influential Democratic and Social Movement (MDS)). Since the MDS is irrelevant in the electoral sphere, we have three parties representing alternative versions of a broadly secular-democratic vision (FFS, RCD and PT). Since the parties in each category are competitors rather than allies, the scope which the regime enjoys for exploiting their rivalries is enormous. At the same time, it has been able to take account of changes in public opinion by orchestrating changes in the electoral fortunes of the various rivals at regular intervals. The way the regime manipulates the parties affects their public standing; parties which accept co-optation by the regime tend to discredit themselves with the electorate in the long run, at which point their usefulness to the regime is exhausted for the time being and it becomes necessary to arrange for them to be replaced. This is what has just happened. The authorities have given the kaleidoscope of Algeria's parties a vigorous shake, and a new configuration has emerged. Unlike a real kaleidoscope, however, the new configuration was not only foreseen, but also intended, by the decision-makers. It therefore furnishes a guide to their broader intentions. The FLN's gain is the RND's loss. In June 1997, the success of the RND, which secured first place with 155 seats, was based on the premise that the regime needed to control the National Assembly, and the premise that the FLN, still discredited by association with the past, would not do. The regime accordingly set up the RND and organised its victory for it. Because the RND was widely seen as a concoction of the state, lacking any historical legitimacy and representing nothing more than the administration, its victory required systematic fraud, and this assumed outrageous proportions in the local elections of October 1997. The technocratic leadership of the RND performed quite well in government at the national level, at least in imposing the draconian prescriptions of structural adjustment. But this did nothing for its popularity and has been a disaster in local government, as the numerous local riots across the country have been demonstrating for the last year. And so the case for restoring the FLN to its former pride of place gained ground with the decision-makers. This case has dovetailed with President Bouteflika's personal preferences, and had already been tacitly accepted when Ali Benflis, a member of the FLN leadership, was appointed prime minister in August 2000. In reality, the FLN had quietly returned to executive power long before last week's elections. While apparently turning out the incumbent RND (now reduced to a mere 47 seats), these have really ratified the incumbent FLN. A different logic accounts for the success of Abdullah Djaballah's MRN (43 seats) and Louisa Hanoune's PT (21 seats). A major figure in Algerian Islamism since the 1980s, Djaballah founded his own party, the Nahda Movement, in 1990, but following its success in winning 34 seats in 1997 he lost control of the MN to a rival faction headed by Lahbib Adami, which wanted to participate in the government, and Djaballah quit the MN to found the MRN in 1999. While Adami's MN has had nothing to show from playing the regime's game, Djaballah has preserved his credibility in opposition, and the regime has clearly decided to recognise his standing by allowing the MRN to score handsomely while the MN, reduced to a single seat, has effectively been destroyed. Meanwhile, the MRN has been allowed to assume the leadership of the Islamist parties, since Nahnah's MSP has been reduced from 69 to 38 seats, a result which undoubtedly reflects the erosion of Nahnah's public standing and thus the diminishing usefulness of his party's support from the regime's point of view. As for Hanoune, she too has established a reputation as a principled politician since the PT gained four seats in 1997. A champion of a political solution to the problem of violence and a vigorous critic of the regime's right wing economic policies, Hanoune has clearly struck a chord in popular audiences. The PT's tally of 21 seats is a surprise, however, and the explanation probably lies in the regime's strategy towards the unresolved problems of Islamist violence on the one hand and the Kabyle revolt on the other. Like Djaballah, Hanoune signed the "Rome platform", which major opposition parties drew up in January 1995 calling for a negotiated solution to the crisis unleashed by the regime's suppression of the FIS and the resulting Islamic rebellion. Since his election in 1999, President Bouteflika has signalled that he wants to end the violence through his own version of "national reconciliation", but that he will tolerate no rivals in this endeavour. His refusal to legalise ex-foreign minister Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi's Wafa party two years ago was clearly motivated by this attitude. This has left Hocine Aït Ahmed's FFS, the architect of the "Rome platform" and an unyielding opponent of the regime, to be reckoned with. The FFS boycotted the elections in deference to Kabyle popular opinion, which has been massively alienated from the regime since provocations by the gendarmerie first ignited rioting in the region 13 months ago. The protesters went beyond a boycott, however; and largely prevented polling from taking place, so that turn-out in the region was a mere two per cent and the official results, giving the FLN most seats, lack all legitimacy. Should fresh elections be held in Kabylia, the FFS can expect to do well. But it cannot expect to improve on its score in 1997, when it won 20 seats. In other words, just as Djaballah has been given the leading role among the Islamists, the leadership of the regime's democratic critics has been given to Hanoune at Aït Ahmed's expense. Overall, President Bouteflika should be happy with the new Assembly, which may accordingly be allowed to play a slightly larger role in the scheme of things. But this scheme has nothing to do with democracy, and this is the fundamental reason why most Algerians did not vote. For as long as the Assembly remains weak, the premises of the regime's lack of accountability will remain in force, and with them the reasons for the continuing crisis of the state-society relationship, whether the Islamist rebellion is ended or not. Related stories: Berbers boycott polls 30 May - 5 June 2002 Focus: A new era 5 - 11 August 1999
