Algeria’s Islamists were reeling Saturday from a stinging setback in legislative polls which saw the ruling party come out on top, resisting the Arab Spring’s tide of democratic change.
The regime argued that the results showed Algerians’ desire for stability, at a time when regime change was bringing chaos to other countries, and outright rejection of Islamism, whose rise 20 years ago led to civil war.
“Election returns governing parties, status quo,” was the French-language El Watan newspaper’s headline Saturday. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s National Liberation Front (FLN) won 220 out of 462 seats up for grabs in Thursday’s legislative elections, improving on its share in the outgoing national assembly.
The seven Islamist parties contesting the polls could only manage a combined 59 seats, a setback after their predictions of victory during the campaign.
The National Rally for Democracy (RND) of Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, a nationalist party close to the military and loyal to Bouteflika, came second with 68 seats, compared to 62 in the outgoing house. While the results largely maintain the status quo, one notable change was the number of elected women, which rose to 145 from seven in the outgoing assembly following the introduction of quotas.
Green Algeria, a three-party Islamist alliance, garnered a paltry 48 seats and charged widespread fraud.
“There has been large-scale manipulation of the real results announced in the regions, an irrational exaggeration of these results to favour the administration parties,” it said in a statement.
In the wake of the popular revolts that became known as the Arab Spring, moderate Islamist parties recorded electoral victories in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. It warned it would take measures in protest but stopped short of clearly positioning itself in the opposition.
Green Algeria’s largest party, the Movement of Society for Peace, was until January part of a government coalition with the FLN and the RND.
The country’s top two parties can form a comfortable majority of 288 seats and no longer need the MSP but the Islamists could remain in government nonetheless. “We are maintaining these ties with between the three parties of the presidential coalition,” the FLN’s influential secretary general Abdelaziz Belkhadem, himself a moderate Islamist within the party, said.
A more radical party with more solid Islamist legitimacy, the Justice and Development Front of Abdallah Djaballah, only collected seven seats. “We’d already experienced Islamism, nobody has forgotten this in Algeria… Voters were looking for security, stability,” political analyst Nourredine Hakiki said.
Turnout had been expected to be low after a campaign that produced no new faces and failed to draw crowds.
But Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia announced a “remarkable” rate of 42.36 percent which he said confirmed Algeria’s democratic credentials.
Many Algerians and observers had predicted that ever deeper mistrust, especially among the country’s majority of young people, could lead to an even worse turnout than the historical low of 35 percent recorded in 2007.
The opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy, which chose to boycott this election, claimed the announced turnout was fraudulent and that the real figure “did not exceed 18 percent.”
Algeria Islamists reel from election fiasco
