Algerians Belittle Elections, but Not Enough to Protest
Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
A polling worker on the outskirts of Algiers had little to do in parliamentary elections last week. The government’s resounding victory surprised no one.
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: May 19, 2012
ALGIERS — As Islamists rode the wave of the Arab Spring to power in Tunisia and Libya, it looked as if that same tide would lift religious parties in this much larger nation in North Africa, too.
Mohamed Messara/European Pressphoto Agency
Ballot counters in Algiers. Anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of citizens boycotted the vote, and about one in five ballots cast were spoiled.
But the Arab Spring is not happening in Algeria, at least not now.
Barely a week after a vote derided by much of the population as a sham, there are no protests in the streets of this capital city. In a volatile region, there are no marches, no rallies and no demonstrations. The long-entrenched military-backed government proclaimed resounding victory, and the response was disbelief — mingled with yawns.
Most Algerians — anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent — boycotted the vote for a legislature that even officials here concede is do-nothing. They took the day off, went to the beach, then went quietly back to work. When the official results were announced Friday, Islamist parties, expected to do well, had been crushed.
And the party in power since independence half a century ago, the FLN, or National Liberation Front, consolidated its aging grip, increasing its majority in the new Parliament.
“These were not elections — it was a piece of theater staged by the government,” said Abdallah Djaballah, leader of a major Islamist party, which was a big loser.
A finely tuned mix of cash and crackdown, money and repression — a mix unique to the region — has muted demands for change and allowed the ruling elite to retain its grip. In Algeria a young person can easily get a government loan of up to $300,000 to start a small business, on terms beyond generous. Like the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf, Algeria has been able to neutralize calls for reform with oil-generated cash reserves — $180 billion — and a government program to dole out money to restive youth.
At the same time, demonstrations are banned in Algiers; a short-lived protest movement in February 2011, a distant echo of Tunisia’s revolt, was quickly overwhelmed by security forces. The police are everywhere, and though criticism flows freely in the street, it is sometimes delivered anonymously, and with a glance over the shoulder.
But while there is palpable frustration with the ruling gerontocracy, there are also long memories of the 1990s, when 200,000 people died in the bloody suppression of an Islamist revolt. Tales of mutilated corpses and mass graves remain common currency.
“They lived it in the flesh,” the interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, said of his fellow Algerians. “They don’t want an Islamist adventure here.”
Today, the capital’s hilly streets are clogged with new cars and aggressive drivers. To government officials, the apparent vote of confidence in the status quo was to be expected. “They see what is going on in the other countries,” Mr. Kablia said, with evident disdain. “The movements in these other countries, they are movements of desperation.”
A fit-looking 79, Mr. Kablia was already a prefect — a high regional official — at Algeria’s liberation in 1962; before, he was a senior officer in the rebel movement of the 1950s that expelled the French.
The government has remained largely silent about the role of the security forces in the crackdown of the ’90s, which served as a potent warning to the people, just as its “opacity,” as a Western diplomat here put it, prevents ordinary citizens from seeing which direction, if any, the country is moving in.
“I’m not expecting anything from these people,” said Mohammed Halyoun, 56, an engineering technician at the counter of a cafe on the seedy Rue Tanger downtown. “You look at what they’ve done over 50 years, it’s hardly satisfying.”
“Everything here happens in the corridors,” he said, adding that he did not vote in the recent elections.
Yet mindful of discontent, the state has dug deeply into its cash holdings. After the protests last year, the government turned on the spigots, analysts here say. “There was a massive injection,” said Mohammed Saïb Musette, an employment specialist at the University of Algiers. “This has had an impact on the reduction of tension,” he said. “Without it the youths would have nothing.”
Paul Schemm/Associated Press
Many Algerians took the opportunity to go to the beach, like this one in Algiers that sported campaign posters, during the parliamentary election last week.
The newspapers here have been full of stories about applicants all over Algeria filling the offices of the specialized youth-loan employment agency. “Submerged by the flood of youth,” El Watan wrote recently of the office at Relizane. Dr. Musette said that in the last year, “the agencies were practically invaded.”
On highly favorable terms — rock-bottom interest rates, eight to nine years before repayment of principle — millions of dollars have been handed out to 19- to 40-year-olds who present plans to start, say, bus services, fast food restaurants or small-scale trucking operations. Sometimes the money simply disappears, through fraud.
At a youth-loan office in the seaside suburb of Zeralda, Souad Gharbi, a 35-year-old lawyer, was signing off on a government loan of nearly $7,000 merely to help her pay the rent — “rent is very high in Algiers,” she explained — a loan she would not have to begin repaying for two or three years, and then, only a portion at already low interest. She was entitled to a similarly generous government grant of $1,400 to buy office equipment.
“The state has invested to the maximum,” Dr. Musette said. Civil service salaries have been raised 50 percent since 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund; overall expenditures are also expected to grow by 50 percent, and there are subsidies for powdered milk, soybean oil and sugar.
“People see there is the $200 billion,” said Hammouda Naccredine, another economist at the university, referring to Algeria’s cash reserves. “And they say, ‘How do I get it?’ ”
The country cut its unemployment rate in half from 2000 to 2007, largely by public spending, making the rate “unsustainable,” the World Bank said in a recent report. And it is indeed unclear — there are no good statistics, Dr. Musette said — how many of the government youth loans actually create permanent jobs.
For now, though, the state is either “acting like a good father of the family,” as the head of the youth-loan employment office, Mourad Zemali, put it, or it has “succeeded in corrupting lots and lots of people,” said a human rights activist, Yacine Zaïd, of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights.
Yet, in the upper echelons there are signs of unease with the current strategy, including the use of cash to reduce youth unemployment. Mr. Kablia, who spoke of “institutional reforms,” changes in “mentalities” and “dialogue with society,” said change was “absolutely necessary.”
“Algeria cannot continue to live closed in on itself,” he said.
On the street after the vote, there were few hopes for the new Parliament and its huge FLN majority. After all, about 18 percent of the vote consisted of spoiled ballots — an unusually high number, indicating discontent.
“There will be nothing,” said Mourad Benchellal, a fruit vendor off Didouche Mourad Street, gesticulating angrily. “They’ve been running the country since ’62. Once they are in power, they forget the people.”
Such sentiments appear ominous to some analysts here.
“The situation has been aggravated by the elections,” said Mohamed Chafik Mesbah, a former Algerian intelligence officer and now a well-known political commentator here. “They have opened up a wide boulevard for the Islamists.”
When the explosion comes, he said, “I think it will be more violent than in Tunisia.”
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