Athmane Ariouat

Every time Algeria holds its local elections, a movie comes to my mind and probably to many of my compatriots’. I am speaking of Carnaval fi dechra (watch here) and its main character Makhlouf el Bombardi portrayed by Athmane Ariouat.

Athmane Ariouat was born in M’doukal, Batna. At the age of 10, his family moved to Algiers where he studied at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique d’Alger between 1969 and 1972. He also took Arabic theatre courses under Mustapha Kasdarli’s supervision. The rest of his biography can be found on Wikipedia (Ar, Fr) or in this video.

I want my ministry too!

Only ten days are left before Algeria’s legislative elections and Algerians do not seem to take them seriously. Or perhaps are they very serious about them and know they won’t change anything and that would be why they decided to ignore them. I can only imagine Bouteflika’s disappointment after he had told the people that the elections day was as important as November 1, 1954.

On the other hand, the candidates and the system chose to ignore the people and their problems. Tit for tat you would say. People still complain about their bad situation, demonstrations are still forbidden, activists are jailed and youths do still set themselves on fire. But the electoral campaign follows its path undisturbed.

Would Compulsory Voting Solve the Abstention Problem in Algeria? Part 1

The Algerian authorities are very busy preparing for the next legislative elections which are due this Spring. One of the major themes which crops again and again in televised programmes is how to tackle abstention. In Algeria, this means low voter-turnout and not simply casting a blank vote. The authorities seem intent this time on ensuring that voter-turnout is adequate (whatever adequate means). This is understandable of course as even a 100% vote doesn’t mean anything if only one person cast a vote (the candidate him/herself). In this video, which shows a part of a programme from the Algerian national TV, we see a legal expert urging citizens to go to vote and he does so by using very peculiar arguments:

I have not watched the entire programme, so it might be that this bit we see here being out of context, the impression we get from what this guy is saying is not accurate. Because if we take it at face value,

Satirical Election Candidate National Contest

Dear compatriots, elections are nigh and the new political parties laws are out and it is time those of you who are thinking of presenting themselves in the next elections start thinking about what the hell they should do to win the democratic game. MnarviDZ has been deploring the utter lack of amusement which renders our national political life rather boring on top of being useless. In the past and up to the early 90’s, we did have glimpses of amusing candidates for the elections and during the single party epoch, there were many actually funny jokes. Not anymore. It’s all gone stale. I am quite grateful however when

The Algerian senatorial elections are a non-event

The results of the senatorial elections have been published. The FLN won 23  seats, the RND 20, the MSP and FNA 2 each, and the RCD 1.

So as expected, the Governmental Alliance (FLN, RND and MSP) won the elections and it is just fair to consider the elections a non-event. And honestly, I would still call it a non-event if a different result came out of the ballot. This is because it is almost impossible for the National Council, by its construction and because of the current Algerian political microcosm, to experience a noticeable change. The National council’s construction does indeed consolidate stability since the president of the Republic appoints one-third of its members, and only half of the members is renewed at a time. Add to this the fact the first three parties in Algeria are associated in the Governmental Alliance.
It is also a non-event because of the very role of this Council. Instead of being a second centre of the legislative power as described here, it is rather used by the President (the executive power) to control the lower chamber of the parliament. This second non-written role is not even performed today since both chambers are under the control of the President: The majority in the lower chamber is held by the three Alliance parties who campaigned for the President and adopted and shared his program, and the majority in the National council is a mixture of members of the same Alliance and members appointed by the President himself.

So if I want to find some interesting points from these not-so-interesting elections I have to look elsewhere.

We first have the PT/RND alliance.