Two days after the presidential elections scheduled for September 7 in Algeria, the Independent National Electoral Authority (ANIE) has become the scapegoat for all the candidates, including the announced winner, the outgoing president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune. A vote marked by an unprecedented abstention and a great deal of confusion over the turnout figures.
According to the figures announced, Tebboune obtained 94.65% of the votes cast. Abdelaali Hassani Cherif, of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP), an Islamist party, obtained 3.17% of the votes and Youcef Aouchiche, of the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), 2.16%. But, against all expectations, on Sunday 8 September, before midnight, the campaign managers of the three candidates denounced, in a joint statement, “irregularities and contradictions in the announced results”expressing his desire to“informing the public about the vagueness and contradictions of the participation figures”.
Probably anxious to conceal the extent of popular discontent, Mohamed Charfi, president of ANIE, had taken some liberties with transparency by announcing a “average participation rate” of 48.03%, based on the participation rates in the wilayas (departments) divided by their number, 58. The participation rate is, in reality, probably less than 25%, if we report the number of votes cast, 5,630,196, compared to the 24,351,551 registered on the lists (the number of spoiled or blank votes has not been reported).
Financial issue
On Monday, the two defeated candidates returned to the charge, accusing ANIE of “obvious fraud” and announcing his intention to appeal to the Constitutional Court. The issue is financial: by obtaining less than 5% of the votes cast, his campaign expenses will not be reimbursed. He is also a politician. The aim of ANIE, by reducing his score, explains analyst Nadjib Belhimer, would be to “mitigate the impact of abstention, even if it does not change the results in any way”.
The scale of the abstention, the first issue of the vote, was truly surprising, even in Mr Tebboune’s camp. The latter had expected a turnout at least higher than that of the presidential elections in December 2019 (less than 40%), which already made him a head of state lacking legitimacy.
To justify their presence in elections that had been decided in advance, the two defeated candidates spoke at a press conference “threats” of the country, without being able to specify them. In the same vein, the Algerian press agency APS launched, shortly after the announcement of the results, a more specific, but already proven, attack against the French media, accused of “to spread lies” : “ [L’Algérie est] on the way out, far away from the poverty colony from which you were expelled… May this choir strive to recognise that Algeria is much better off than France. »
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