Anger and apathy as Algerians go to polls
YouTube video urging election boycott gets almost four million hits in country of 20 million voters thanks to bad economy
ALGIERS // Algerians voted yesterday for a new parliament amid soaring unemployment and a financial crisis caused by a collapse in oil revenues.
But despite urgent challenges facing the country, candidates struggled to inspire voters disillusioned by broken government promises and a tainted political system, including recent allegations of people paying to be added to party lists.
As such, voters have shown little interest in the election.
Streets in Algiers were nearly deserted yesterday morning.
An unofficial call to boycott led by young Algerians popular on YouTube unexpectedly went viral, with one video gathering 3.9 million views in a country with about 20 million eligible to vote. Fearing a low turnout and public apathy, officials have spent weeks urging people to take part.
At an all- female meeting in the eastern city of Setif, prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal urged women to wake their husbands early and drag them to the polling stations.
“If they resist, hit them with a stick,” he said.
The authorities have also used mosques to spread the message. Algeria weathered the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings with huge spending on wages and subsidies that depleted government coffers.
But a collapse in crude oil prices in 2014 forced the government to raise taxes and mothball many public projects.
Half of the country’s population of 40 million is under 30.
One in three young people are unemployed.
About 45,000 police officers were deployed yesterday to guard the 53,000 polling stations across the country.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 80, who has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, voted from a wheelchair at a polling booth in Algiers – his first appearance since he was sworn in for a fourth term in April 2014.
Mr Bouteflika’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and its coalition ally, the Rally for National Democracy ( RND), have enjoyed a comfortable majority since a 2012 poll, which they are expected to retain.
But Nourredine Bekis, professor of sociology at the University of Algiers, said parliamentarians had little real influence.
“The president holds all the power,” he said.
Religious conservatives, who held 60 seats in the outgoing parliament, represent the country’s main opposition force.
In 2012, they had hoped they could replicate the gains of their peers in Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab Spring, but instead suffered their worst electoral defeat.
This year, they have formed two electoral alliances in an attempt to do better.
But since Algeria adopted a multiparty system in 1989, the opposition has repeatedly accused the ruling parties of electoral fraud.
The first results are expected today.
‘ The president holds all the power Nourredine Bekis Professor of sociology