This is a result that hardly comes as a surprise. After the election on Saturday, the outgoing president of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was overwhelmingly re-elected for a second term with 94.65% of the votes among the 5.63 million “votes recorded”, according to the official results published this Sunday, September 8 at the end of the day. Helped by the windfall of natural gas, of which Algeria is the leading African exporter, Tebboune promised to increase salaries and pensions, two million new homes and 450,000 new jobs, to make Algeria “the second economy in Africa”, behind South Africa.
Facing the outgoing president, two candidates were in the running: Abdelaali Hassani, a 57-year-old engineer, head of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP, the main Islamist party), and Youcef Aouchiche, 41, a former journalist and senator, head of the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS, the oldest opposition party).
The campaign management of candidate Hassani denounced in a press release on Sunday “violations” of the voting process, with “pressure on certain polling station officials to inflate the results”, particularly the turnout rate.
A mediocre campaign
This low turnout is explained by “a mediocre campaign”, with few meetings and Tebboune’s competitors “not up to the task”, analysis by AFP Hasni Abidi, Algerian political scientist. “Voters said to themselves what’s the point of voting if all the predictions are in favor of the president,” he explains, before noting that Tebboune “will survive a deficit in popular support, provided he completely reviews his method of governance and makes changes to his team.”
Tebboune’s career took off in the late 1990s, when Abdelaziz Bouteflika appointed him as a minister, six times. The wave of the Hirak, the pro-democracy movement, then annihilated Bouteflika’s attempt at a fifth term and offered Abdelmadjid Tebboune, 73, a new career. In December 2019, the latter was elected with 58% of the vote in the first round, with a considerable abstention rate: 60.12%.
At the end of the campaign on Tuesday, the man whom Internet users affectionately nickname “aammi Tebboune” (Uncle Tebboune) pledged to give young people – more than half of the population and a third of the voters – the “place that suits them”. Tebboune claims that his first five-year term was hampered by Covid-19 and the corruption of his predecessor.