A dramatic turn of events after a dismal campaign. On Sunday, September 8, before midnight, the campaign managers of the three Algerian presidential candidates, including the winner, denounced in a joint statement the “major inconsistencies” The provisional results of the presidential elections of 7 September, published by the Independent National Electoral Authority (ANIE), show that Abdelmadjid Tebboune obtained 5,329,253 votes, or 94.65% of the votes cast. Abdelaali Hassani Cherif of the Movement for Society for Peace (MSP), an Islamist party, obtained 178,797 votes (3.17%) and Mohamed Aouchiche of the Front of Socialist Forces, 122,146 votes (2.16%).
But the historically low level of participation led Mohamed Charfi, president of ANIE, to take some liberties with transparency. He refused to announce the turnout rate, although it was easy to guess from the number of votes cast, 5,630,196 against the 24,351,551 voters who made up the electoral body. Many Internet users have supplemented this with their calculator to obtain, at best, a turnout rate of between 23 and 25%.
On September 7, Mohamed Charfi provided a misleading figure on a “average participation rate” of 48.03%, which consists of taking the participation rates in the wilayas (communities) and dividing them by 58 (their number). One method of calculation quickly became mocked. In a Facebook post, now withdrawn, former MSP leader Abderrazak Makri criticised a “unprecedented increase in the participation rate in the entire history of Algerian elections.” “The president did not even need to manipulate this rate, he had already wonhe added. This falsification of the participation rate takes away all credibility from the elections. »
Then, on the evening of September 8, against all odds, the campaign managers of the three candidates denounced, in a joint press release “irregularities and contradictions in the announced results”, indicating that they listen “informing the public about the vagueness and contradictions of the participation figures”The press release also highlights the existence of a “error in announcing the percentages of each candidate” and “Contradictory data with the vote counting records” submitted to the electoral authority by local electoral commissions.
A cold shower for the re-elected president
If the ANIE’s inconsistencies are very real, its president Mohamed Charfi serves here as a scapegoat for the three candidates, whose names are now associated with the presidential election that has historically mobilized fewer voters. The re-elected outgoing president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the FFS candidate, Youcef Aouchiche, and the MSP, Abdelaali Hassani Cherif, failed to overcome the abstention of Algerians whose political demands formulated during the popular protest movement Hirak are very far from the offer proposed by the regime. However, it was the first issue of the vote.
However, with some delay, Mohamed Charfi said “satisfied with the strong participation of citizens in this period” and assured that the “The Algerian people, all its components combined, demonstrated a high degree of electoral maturity”. In fact, these elections have had the effect of a cold shower for President Abdelmadjid Tebboune. The turnout rate is apparently much lower than that recorded in 2019: it was 39.88%.
Nouri Driss, professor of political sociology, notes on his Facebook page: “Power no longer has the tools and institutions that allow it to understand society. It is disconnected from society and society is disconnected from it. The mechanisms on which power is based do not reflect reality…” Lyas Hallas, director of the electronic magazine Twala, He noted that with such a low turnout, President Tebboune was poorly re-elected: “There is no point in disguising the numbers. His project (assuming he has a project) does not attract support. He cannot initiate reforms or mobilise initiatives. We can imagine what his second term will be like. He will look for unfinished slides from the Bouteflika era to inaugurate but, above all, he will accentuate the repression of criticism, at the risk of causing a social implosion and pushing the country into a zone of turbulence…”
As a former journalist underlines on the pretext of anonymity, Algerians, whose expression has been stifled by constant repression since the end of the Hirak due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, confirm, with this record level of abstention, that they have other demands than the artificial political life offered by the regime: “The FFS and the MSP are the big losers in this election, but President Tebboune has lost more. His room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the army is smaller than ever. He cannot be a Bouteflika.”
