The Consultative Council (known as the Choura or Parliament) of the El Bina Movement, an Islamist party, has chosen Abdelmadjid Tebboune as its candidate for the September 7, 2024, presidential election. Abdelkader Bengrina, the loud-mouthed head of the party and master of Tebboune, announced on Friday that “after an in-depth examination of the conclusions of the consultations initiated by the party with activists, elites, political, social and civil society actors and taking into account its great responsibilities, the movement decided to make Abdelmadjid Tebboune its rider» for the next presidential elections.
The decision by Bengrina, himself a candidate against Tebboune in the 2019 presidential election, comes less than 24 hours after the establishment of a four-party alliance, known as the “Coalition of Majority Parties for Algeria”, including the El Bina Movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN, formerly the unified party), National Democratic Assembly (RND) and Front El Mostaqbel. Apart from the latter, the coalition that today supports Tebboune’s candidacy is the same one that supported the 5th mandate of the late Abdelaziz Bouteflika at the beginning of 2019. It just shows that the “new Algeria” is making something new out of something old.
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Although these four parties were expected to announce their support for Tebboune’s candidacy at the same time, Bengrina started before the starter to show that he is a bigger vassal than his partners.
Bengrina’s party chose Tebboune as its driver at the same time as two new opposition candidates announced their participation in the next presidential election on Friday. We are talking about Youcef Aouchiche, the first national secretary of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), the oldest opposition party in Algeria, for which this will be almost the first presidential candidacy. Indeed, its historic founder, the late Houcine Aït Ahmed, certainly presented his candidacy for the 1999 presidential election, against Bouteflika, but quickly withdrew it so as not to legitimize the victory of Bouteflika, a candidate supported by some of the Algerian generals. army.
For his part, Abdelali Hassani, the leader of the Movement for Peace (MSP-Islamist), announced on Friday, May 24, that he will be his party’s candidate in the next presidential election.
These new challengers thus follow in the footsteps of perennial candidate Louise Hanouna (Workers’ Party-PT), nicknamed Arlette Laguiller from Algeria, and Zoubida Assoul, Hirak’s lawyer and president of the Union for Change and Progress (UCP).
Let us recall that the three opposition parties competing for the presidential elections (FFS, PT and UCP) boycotted the parliamentary elections on June 12, 2021, while Kabylia, where the FFS is very influential, completely ignored the 2019 presidential elections and the 2020 constitutional referendum. and the 2021 legislative elections, whose participation rates showed almost single digits, close to zero, in this region.
So what is Abdelmadjid Tebboune doing by maintaining a false uncertainty about his candidacy, three and a half months from the actual election date?
Unable to go out into the field or organize popular meetings across certain vilayets in the country, with the aim of publicly and officially announcing his candidacy for a second term, Tebboune has recently been forced to organize small meetings behind closed doors, where he never stops leaning on the so-called achievements ” of the new Algeria”. He even went so far as to make projections about his future achievements, such as promising to raise Algeria’s GDP to $400 billion in 2027.
Read also: This Tebboune that nobody wants
On March 30, during one of his conversations with the public media, Tebboune refused to say whether he would be a candidate for a second presidential term, but at the same time confirmed that he would officially visit Paris just after the announcement of the official results of the presidential elections. Which means not only that he will be a candidate for a second term, but that he will also be the winner of this presidential election.
The fake presidential election in Algeria provides further evidence that the System is blocking the way to any hope of change. In this country where more than 70% of the population is under the age of 30, Algerians will once again be led by senile chibans, eight-year-olds who understand today’s world using a reading grid, before the fall of the Berlin Wall.