On the eve of the presidential election to be held Saturday in Algeria, more than a hundred members of the Algerian diaspora around the world, many of whom live in Canada, are calling on the population to massively, peacefully and visibly reject “this electoral farce” to highlight “the people’s rupture” with an authoritarian and anti-democratic regime that is preparing, unsurprisingly, according to them, to re-elect President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to the top of the State.
In a letter sent to the Dutythe group denounces a “predetermined” election that will be held on September 7 in an “unprecedented context of repression, closure of the political and media field” and a “crisis of political legitimacy”. And it demands in passing the implementation of a real democratic transition, involving the end of the “strategy of terror”, but also the immediate release of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners, whose number has exceeded 220 in the run-up to the election, according to human rights organizations present in Algeria.
“The minimum conditions for a free, honest and transparent election are not met in this election,” summarizes in an interview the Algerian democratic activist Rabah Moulla, co-signatory of this letter with the professor at HEC Montréal Omar Aktouf and the Canadian researcher in geopolitics Raouf Farrah, imprisoned in Algerian jails for eight months for crime of opinion last year, to name but a few. “There is always this threat installed in Algeria and which prevents speaking out, a repression which reached a new level during this electoral campaign and which removed any form of opposition and any candidate of this opposition from the ballots,” affirms Mr. Moulla.
Legitimacy contested
Elected in December 2019 in the context of a record abstention rate of 60% and while Algerians had been pounding the asphalt of cities for months for the creation of a democracy and a rule of law, Abdelmadjid Tebboune should easily win a second term on September 7, during this early presidential election. The man entered the race by promising to continue building a “new Algeria”. He praised his socio-economic record of the last five years, which, according to him, laid a “first milestone for our economy to become that of an emerging country”.
Since 2022, Algeria has benefited from an increase in the price of natural gas, of which it is the leading exporter in Africa, to straighten out its public finances and allow Mr. Tebboune to articulate a governance with populist overtones that has placed the increase in the standard of living of Algerians at the heart of its concerns. In recent weeks, the leader has promised the creation of 450,000 jobs, but also the increase of the minimum wage, the salary of state employees and unemployment benefit. Unemployment, which has been falling since he took office and now stands at around 12%, still affects 36% of those under 24.
Voices gone
But beyond this economic framework, Algeria has failed since 2019 to implement the political and social reforms demanded by the Hirak, this revolution of smiles born in reaction to the attempt of the former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to run for a fifth term despite his age and illness.
Halted by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the movement and its activists have since been the target of relentless repression. Amnesty International estimated in a report last February that the Algerian regime continued to “repress the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly”, and this, by “targeting critical voices of dissent”.
In this election season, several of these critical voices have paid the price, such as Fethi Ghares, former spokesperson for the Democratic and Social Movement, a left-wing political party banned from the political scene by the regime in 2023, and his wife, Messaouda Cheballah, a political activist, both arrested and placed “under judicial supervision” during the summer. They were banned from publishing information on social networks and speaking to the media, in the run-up to Saturday’s vote.
The same ban applies to the strong opposition figure, Karim Tabbou, who also cannot “participate in a television program or press conference” and must refrain from “any political activity” in the context of the current campaign, established the justice system, which is at the service of the power in place.
“The failure of the Algerian regime is obvious,” said Rabah Moulla. “The government is not capable of responding to the legitimate aspirations of the people and the needs of Algerians in terms of social justice, fair distribution of wealth, freedom of expression, democratization… and that is why this presidential election will be, like the previous one, ignored by the majority of the population.”
A predictable abstention, according to him, is what will confirm the strength of the democratic demands of Algerians. “The survival and resurgence of the Hirak are inevitable,” he says, “even if the movement does not resume the form it had in 2019. Faced with the failure of the system, the struggles will continue to grow inside and outside the country, until Algeria truly becomes a modern and democratic country.”