Inside Bouteflika's Presidential Election Resources

President Bouteflika. Photo credit: El Moujahid newspaper

The North Africa Journal : As expected, Abdelaziz Bouteflika won a third presidential mandate following a campaign that was unchallenged and underwhelming.

While voters were seemingly offered plenty of choices, as a dozen candidates have been working to meet the filing conditions, and manage their campaigns, mostly mediocre ones, the reality is that no one was as prepared and motivated as the current outgoing president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Bouteflika has made his intention clear that he will want to go for another round and has forced constitutional amendments to scrap the term limit law, allowing for instance a third five-year term for a seating president. The presidential campaign for Bouteflika has been a multi-year in the making and not an overnight initiative as is the case for all of the other candidates.

The president virtually controls the key political parties and bureaucracies, such as the powerful FLN party (National Liberation Front), that worked relentlessly to get him a third mandate. He has managed to bring the nationalist party RND back into the mold by re-appointing its top leader, Ahmed Ouyahia, as prime minister. For a short period of time, after Ouyahia was sacked, the RND began to distance itself from Bouteflika since Ouyahia himself ambitioned to run for office. But all of that changed. Bouteflika also worked to weaken opposition parties, which are greatly irrelevant in today’s Algeria’s body politic. So what’s left are enormous resources available for Bouteflika as he campaigned for reelection. Continue here.