Amel Boubekeur assesses Bouteflika's victory and Algeria's stagnating changes President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika sailed to an easy victory in Algeria's presidential elections on 9 April, winning a third term with 90 per cent of the votes and an official voter turnout of 74.5 per cent -- 24 per cent according to the opposition. Algerians expected massive fraud, but widely considered the five other candidates to be both unrepresentative and lacking in ideas. Does an election with a forgone conclusion still deserve any interest? Yes, this election revealed the most important changes Algeria has been through over the past 10 years. During the 2009 campaign Bouteflika boasted of flourishing oil and energy exports, a lower external debt and a certain return to stability and security. The common people have not fared so well, witnessing the suppression of union strikes, social riots, ongoing terrorist attacks, 75 per cent unemployment of those under 30, rising numbers of harragas (illegal immigrants), skyrocketing prices, and a largely unproductive economy. Even Algeria's buildings had two sides during the campaign. The façade repainted two days before the visit of the president and the rear, dilapidated and invisible. These elections revealed that Algerians have no political choice. They may vote for Bouteflika and hope for a superficial repaint, or boycott the elections and remain marginalised and invisible. The boycott was massive but the opposition was neutralised. In 1995, the Islamist and so-called secular parties signed together in Rome a platform stating their disavowal of violence. In 1999, six of the candidates running against Bouteflika withdrew from the elections and condemned them as fraudulent. Ten years later the opposition is laminating. Instead of building long-term alternative political structures with the people on the ground, leftist and Islamist opponents either spent the last decade clashing with the regime or joining Bouteflika's administration and campaigned for him. During the campaign, the Socialist Forces Front and Rally for Culture and Democracy party, secular leftist parties, tried to organise demonstrations in order to channel the people's boycott. This was seen as opportunistic by a generation born in the 1990s, who were voting for the first time and didn't know much about these parties. The Trotskyst candidate Louisa Hanoune was allowed to run against Bouteflika but had been forced to vote yes to the amendment of the constitution allowing him to run for a third term. Islamists, who are seen as Algeria's main danger, were also left with a token role in the elections. Hamas, the Islamist party which officially came second in the 1995 elections, did not contest the 2009 elections. It is now a member of the Presidential Alliance, made of the National Liberation Front (FLN), its junior twin the Democratic National Rally (RND) and the Islamist Hamas, and supported Bouteflika. With the president making amnesty the most important theme of his campaign, the call by Al-Qaeda and former Islamic Salvation Front leaders Abbas Madani and Ali Belhadj for a boycott sounded hollow. The two Islamist candidates who were allowed to run in the 2009 elections had no grassroots legitimacy, as was the case for Mohamed Said whose party was created two months before launching his campaign and has still not been registered. Even the army did not seem to take on its traditional role of controlling the political field anymore. In the 2004 elections the generals supported the FLN candidate Ali Benflis against Bouteflika. In 2009, the army and their children are controlling the country's biggest businesses and now approve of Bouteflika. With the minister of interior forbidding boycott activities and the opposition lacking an alternative vision Algerians have been left with the only remaining option -- passivity. Neutralising the opposition, Bouteflika did everything to impose himself as the only relevant political actor of the country. In 10 years, he has become an all-powerful president who decides in place of representative institutions to extend or limit the terrorist amnesty deadlines, who decides the price of gas. Even artistic events must be organised under his patronage. Abstention still matters to the regime and money was used to try to prevent it. In the 2007 legislative elections, participation was officially reported to be around 35 per cent (15 per cent according to the opposition). One week before the elections, the president's campaign staff predicted that voter turn-out would be 78 per cent. Abstention was in fact Bouteflika's only serious competition. The president clearly stated that he wanted to be massively re-elected in order to preserve international legitimacy and historical legacy. He transformed the elections into a populist political literacy exercise. For the first time in 47 years of FLN's reign, Algerians heard their president asking them to "vote for me or against me but express your choice". Rather than having a debate with the other candidates, he put himself above all political parties. He decided to run as an independent candidate disregarding his own party, the RND, and using the state apparatus as his electoral machine. The ministers of the presidential alliance literally pounded public spaces, organising 8,000 meetings in the three-week campaign, mobilising public institutions, public media and even mosques, and rallying 5,000 NGOs to his candidacy. The campaign publicised that to secure loyalty, Bouteflika does not rely on a specific party or a reformist political project but on redistribution of money. He first doubled the MPs' salaries before asking them to modify the constitution. One million houses, three million jobs and $105 billion in investments before 2014 were the crucial arguments of his campaign. Bouteflika is, above all, a candidate who rewards his supporters. Big corporations which funded his campaign in 2004 got good public markets and are now advertising huge pictures of him everywhere on their stores, buildings and buses. In the president's 2009 support committees one could find people who benefited from free apartments and former terrorists pardoned by his amnesty law. The majority of his supporters are not members of a party and do not seek to belong to one. Faced with opposition parties unable to think about a common alternative political project, a rising number of Algerians are seeking favours through relationships with the president and his circles. They prefer to forget about politics and freedom and remind themselves that after all Bouteflika brought back security to Algeria. Elections have revealed how Algerians became less citizens connected to reliable institutions than the president's clients. During the campaign he erased the farmers' debts, offered to double students' scholarship and to reduce flight ticket prices for the diaspora. However, it was still necessary to pay young people 1,000 dinars (10 euros) to attend his electoral meetings and government employees were warmed they would not be paid if they didn't vote. The international community was indifferent. In 1999, supporting Bouteflika was important to the US and the EU. Despite the success of the country in promoting the common struggle against terrorism, Algeria's foreign relations have deteriorated since. Its participation in the Union for the Mediterranean and the European Neighbourhood Policy has been minimal, its potential membership to the WTO is still problematic, and US foreign investors are leaving the country worried about protectionist laws. Despite Bouteflika's request for international observers, none came, recalling their helplessness to prevent fraud at previous elections. Bouteflika's victory is one of a political model based on the sidelining of political parties and distribution of money to fill in the country's institutional deficit. The most interesting change has been the space given to voters during the elections. From now on the Algerian president will need more than being re-elected to preserve real legitimacy. He will need to transform voters into citizens and make those who have been mobilised during the campaign genuinely participate in the country's reforms. This will mainly depend on his willingness to open a political scene that is still under a state of emergency since 1992. He will also need to renew his policies towards the youth as the new generation does not have any interest in the regime's old mythologies of security, terrorism and revolution and rather seek to find jobs in a non-corrupt environment. If his promise of stability only leads to stagnation, Algerians may become more apathetic than they already are, and return to violence as they did in 1988. * The author is an associate scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut
