When Algerians voted to elect their new president on Sept. 7, few expected the results to be anything other than a foregone conclusion. Unsurprisingly, the following day, the country’s electoral commission—known by its French acronym, ANIE—reported that the incumbent, 78-year-old President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, had won reelection, with preliminary figures pointing to him securing over 94 percent of the vote.
His competitors, Abdelali Hassan Cherif of the Movement of Society and Peace—an Islamist party—and Youcef Auchiche of the Socialist Forces Front, reportedly secured just over 3 percent and 2 percent of the vote, respectively.
As soon as the election results were announced, however, their credibility was shot to pieces. Mohamed Charfi, the head of Algeria’s election watchdog, said on Sept. 7 that the level of “provisional average turnout” surpassed 48 percent. But a day later, additional information revealed significant incongruencies that would put the turnout level at 25 percent at best, leading not just Cherif and Auchiche to challenge the validity of the ANIE’s tallies, but also Tebboune.
When the final electoral results were announced on Sept. 14, the ANIE doubled its tally of the number of ballots cast, putting the turnout rate at over 46 percent, and declared Tebboune the official winner with 84.3 percent of the vote.
Few Algerians will believe the regime’s figures in any case. They have long lost faith in voting as a way to choose their leaders or any aspect of how they are governed. Another low-turnout, so-called election simply further underlines Algerians’ disillusionment with army rule behind an imposed democratic façade.
But the blatant contradictions in the preliminary figures released by the ANIE paint a picture of an authoritarian regime that has either become too sloppy at rigging elections or unable to agree on how best to effectively hide its unpopularity.
Electoral politics in Algeria have long been engineered from the top down as a performance of democratic norms, allowing the regime—popularly known as le pouvoir, or the power—to perpetuate itself. Presidential elections are merely used to appoint an army-approved politician to head the government, while Algeria’s generals continue to rule over the political system form behind the scenes.
But as the military regime becomes increasingly unpopular, rigging elections is no longer just about determining who should serve as the civilian stand-in for the generals. More and more, it is about pumping up participation numbers in an attempt to give the whole exercise a trace of legitimacy.
This explains the 46 percent turnout reported by the ANIE in its final tally for this year’s election, which ostensibly marks an improvement over the reported 40 percent participation levels of Tebboune’s first electoral victory in 2019. But both figures were figments of the regime’s imagination, as Algerians are less and less inclined to participate in the stage-managed electoral processes set up by their authoritarian rulers.
That all three candidates, including Tebboune, complained about the lack of transparency and incongruencies in the electoral results only made things more surreal this time around: The election was so openly manipulated that even its regime-appointed “winner” seemed uncomfortable with the initially reported results.
The fact that Algeria’s regime opted to rely on another Tebboune presidential term to maintain itself in power signals that it lacks good options moving forward.
Much like the massive Hirak popular protests that gripped the country from 2019 to 2021, the low turnout in the presidential election is another clear sign that Algerians disapprove of the way they are governed. But the fact that the regime opted to rely on another Tebboune presidential term to maintain itself in power signals that it lacks good options moving forward.
Moreover, the seemingly amateurish way in which the results were announced might indicate other difficulties at the top of the regime. Of course, opposition to Tebboune at the ballot box was always going to be merely nominal. And the initial inconsistencies in the announced results might have been due to lack of organization.
But if the blatant disparities in the initial voting figures were not merely a mistake by an over-zealous government official, it could mean that some powerful faction in the military or security services hoped to see the opening of Tebboune’s second five-year presidential term mired in controversy.
Several Algerian presidents have attempted to reduce the weight of the army and the security services in the ruling system. All have failed. At least one of them, Mohamed Boudiaf, was likely assassinated for it.
It could be that Algeria’s real rulers are taking no chances with Tebboune: By delegitimizing his reelection from the start, it sidelines him as a threat in the event he intended to make any moves to weaken the military’s grip on power.
When Tebboune was first selected for the presidency five years ago, Algeria’s military autocrats were attempting to stabilize the country after months of popular protests demanding that the generals step away from power and open the country’s political system. Known as the Hirak movement, the protests initially erupted as a spontaneous response to the regime’s decision to have then-President Abdelaziz Bouteflika run for a third term. Bouteflika was 82 years old at the time and in poor health, having spent years avoiding public appearances due to his visible infirmity.
The popular discontent driving the protests was heightened by years of dwindling spending on social benefits due to the sharp decline in the price of oil and gas exports, which are responsible for much of the country’s GDP and the government’s revenues. Since independence, those benefits have been at the heart of the country’s social contract, by which the regime guaranteed a wide range of social goods and protections in return for Algerians accepting a lack of real input into how they are governed.
The Hirak protest movement has since died down, due to mounting repression and pandemic-era bans on public gatherings, but also a social spending spree made possible by the subsequent rise in global energy prices.
However, the fact that Algerians are looking at five more years of a Tebboune presidency essentially means that the military has not yet figured out how to move forward after the 2019-2021 period of unrest. The army has once again revealed itself as the real power in the country despite the dent left by the Hirak protests on its legitimacy, in the hope that it can maintain the status quo without really having a plan for addressing the country’s challenges.
After chasing away a president that was effectively too old to even pretend to wield power in 2019, Algerians are once again stuck with an aged head of state that is the hallmark of a decrepit and unpopular regime.
Tebboune has faced severe health problems in the past. Should he be unable to finish his term, it would open up another political crisis. And even if does complete it, Algeria’s rentier regime could easily find itself once more under budgetary pressures and political strain should energy prices come back down and the money for social spending begins to dwindle again. For now, Algerians hoping for political change will be disappointed. But another Tebboune presidential term signals that despite its brutal repression, Algeria’s hugely unpopular autocratic regime remains intrinsically vulnerable.
Francisco Serrano is a journalist, writer and analyst. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Weapons of Reason, The Outpost, Foreign Affairs and other outlets. His latest book, “As Ruínas da Década,” about the Middle East in the decade after the 2011 popular revolts, was published in 2022.