Algeria’s Furious Youth Movement

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/algeria-protests-bouteflika.html

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You can say this much as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria runs for a fifth term next month — he’s alive. At least that’s what his nation’s ambassador to France felt the need to make clear on Monday while the 82-year-old Mr. Bouteflika, who has been essentially out of sight since suffering a stroke in 2013, is being treated in a Geneva hospital.

Unlike old soldiers, he refuses to fade away, but that has plunged his oil- and gas-rich North African state into crisis.

The announcement that the president would run in elections scheduled for April 18 set off weeks of mass protests across Algeria, a relatively rare phenomenon in a country that eluded the wave of Arab Spring protests in 2011. Many people have said the crowds were larger than any antigovernment demonstrations since the 1980s. They grew in size as the days went on.

Mr. Bouteflika’s campaign director nonetheless went ahead on Sunday and delivered a truckload of petitions required of candidates. Under Algerian rules, the candidate is supposed to hand the petitions over to the Constitutional Council in person, which Mr. Bouteflika couldn’t do from a hospital room in Geneva. That sort of technicality has not bothered his government for some time now. The president is known as “the frame” because he is usually visible to the public only in framed portraits.

Along with the petitions, a letter to the Algerian people purportedly from the president was read aloud on state television, promising that should he be re-elected, Mr. Bouteflika would hold an “inclusive national conference” to write a new constitution followed by a vote to elect the next president, in which he would not run. “I listened and heard the heartfelt cry of protesters and in particular of the thousands of youth who asked me about the future of our country,” the letter said.

No you didn’t, replied the youth by going right back out into the streets that evening. Their argument is straightforward: Mr. Bouteflika, in power since 1999, cannot run the country and probably hasn’t for some time. In his stead, a shadowy cabal of businessmen, generals, intelligence chiefs and politicians, including the army chief of staff and the president’s brothers, known as “le pouvoir” (the power), have been running the state and milking its wealth. Protesters saw Mr. Bouteflika’s letter as nothing more than a ploy by le pouvoir to gain time while they engineer a way to stay in control.

There lies the problem. Like many strongmen, Mr. Bouteflika has been careful not to groom a successor, and his cronies have ejected anyone who appeared to be making a play for power. There is no vice president; Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, the head of the armed forces, is approaching 80; and Mr. Bouteflika’s powerful brother Said reportedly has detractors in le pouvoir.

The opposition, moreover, is weak and divided, and many older Algerians associate the president and his National Liberation Front with relative stability and would vote for him again.

Mr. Bouteflika came to power in the wake of a horrific civil war in which some 200,000 people were killed, after the military shut down legislative elections in the early 1990s in which Islamists won early rounds of voting. He is credited with bringing peace and recovery, helped by rising prices for Algeria’s dominant exports, oil and gas.

Stability and oil enabled Algeria to weather the 2011 uprisings in the region, but with them came political repression. And when oil prices plunged, so did foreign currency reserves and the government’s ability to placate the public. Unemployment among youth, who account for more than half the population and didn’t share the trauma of the civil war, is now 29 percent.

Members of the clique in control of Algeria, including Mr. Bouteflika if he is still in command of his senses, are aware what happened to neighboring regimes in the Arab Spring, and what could happen to them if they refuse to fade away. Mr. Bouteflika has pledged a national conference; perhaps the time to convene it is now, before the next elections.

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