Algeria: Has Spring Arrived?

ALGERIA

Has Spring Arrived?

Call them hooligans. Call them activists. Either way, young soccer fans are raising their voices and calling for change in Algeria.

“A marginalized class will always find a way to carve out its own territory and, in Algeria, that space exists in football stadiums,”wrote the Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper.

Earlier this month, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, an 82-year-old who suffered a debilitating stroke six years ago, was undergoing treatment in a Swiss hospital. Yet he intended to seek a fifth term to extend his 20-year rule when voters were slated to go to the polls to elect their head of state in April.

Algerians who have lived under Bouteflika have suffered as the price of oil has dropped, tanking the North African country’s economy. Youth unemployment especially is high. His decision to stand for an office he is clearly too frail to occupy renewed the spark that created the Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings that rocked the region in 2011, the leftwing newsmagazine Counterpunch explained.

Protests erupted. Remarkably, Bouteflika announced that he would drop his candidacy, Al Jazeera wrote. But he also indefinitely delayed presidential elections, a move that appeared designed to shut people up without delivering change. It had the opposite effect.

The protesters began chanting as if they were in a soccer stadium: “Either you leave or we’re going to leave” and “No fifth mandate for you, Bouteflika.”

Algeria is now in a political limbo that Bloomberg warned could be potentially dangerous because no one is stepping up to become the country’s leader. Without a leader to channel the demands of the crowds, the street’s demands are likely to grow more extreme. In that environment, the Algerian military might react with a violent crackdown that could lead to civil war. Or other forces, like militant Islamists, might step into the vacuum. The former occurred in Syria. The latter occurred in Egypt. Both occurred in Algeria in the 1990s.

Bouteflika’s political party, the National Liberation Front, isn’t helping. Interim party leader Moab Bouchareb recently told party honchos that the party supported the protesters, the Associated Press reported. But on the same day, Reuters wrote, he also told local television that the party “values the decisions” of the president.

The country is at an impasse, wrote Abdelkader Cheref, a US-based Algerian scholar, in an op-ed in the National, a Gulf newspaper. Cheref suggested that the army, an institution that wields enormous power, help the country transition to a full-fledged democracy.

The protesters might or might not accept that proposal. Either way, they want real progress soon.