Algeria slouches toward its elections

Algeria is stuck in a rut. The country is embarrassed by being corralled into accepting a fourth term for a leader few think is fit to serve as head of state. But the truth is that these elections matter very little. The aging politico-military elite, best embodied by the zombie-esque President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, must eventually give way to other forces — whether it happens now or in five years. In the meantime, a boycott bloc and a small protest movement initiated by urban youth are unlikely to derail yet another victory for Bouteflika.

News reports would have you believe that there is unrest and discontent in the capital. In fact, a heavy haze of calm hangs over Algiers. Algeria is the hardest country in North and West Africa to obtain a visa for, and has even now ticked off a legion of foreign reporters by stalling their visas to come cover the elections. The sad and unintended consequence of this is misleading descriptions in the international press of turmoil that, as of this writing, simply doesn’t exist. Algerians are more apathetic than they are angry, and voter turnout is typically low — between 25 and 30 percent of Algerians turned up at the polls during the last elections.

The country used to offer a much more idealistic and optimistic vision of postcolonial statehood. In 2004, as the U.S. continued its bloody and catastrophic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was an American student in Paris, reading Frantz Fanon and watching “The Battle of Algiers.” Nothing could have been more seductive than the idea of a country that was founded in the fight against colonialism that my own country seemed to be reversing. And Algeria is not just any country — it is resource-rich and has the continent’s most powerful military.

There was some truth to these liberation narratives. In the years after Algeria gained independence from France, the country served as an incubator for the values that were hatched in the Arab and African wars for freedom. In the 1970s, Algeria nationalized oil and gas reserves, invested extensively in universal education and health care, worked toward pan-Africanism and peace between Iran and Iraq, and backed the Black Panthers and the Palestinian and Sahraoui struggles against occupation. In doing so, it set anti-imperialist agendas, respected national sovereignty and anti-interventionism, and promoted cooperation among countries struggling for self-determination.

These initiatives were exhilarating for both the Algerian people and citizens of other developing and decolonizing countries. But in the process, the political-military regime, led by Houari Boumediene, became a new front of oppression. The regime began assassinating opponents and cracking down on dissent. An effort to institute change began with peaceful protests in Kabylie in the 1980s, but turned into a proto-Arab Spring horror story in the 1990s, with rebels and fundamentalists taking to the same mountain maquis their revolutionary anti-imperial forebears had founded. The state prevailed. Algerians are still relieved that the massacres are past — a victory that Bouteflika still takes credit for presiding over.

Besides ending the war, the regime has done little to win popular support. The sense that Algeria is in decline is pervasive: Military spending proliferates, but investments that would benefit ordinary Algerians aren’t made. The oil and gas industry is beset by greed and scandal, public infrastructure has seen few improvements, health care and education have stagnated or declined, and the broad public suffers from unemployment and housing shortages. In this election, even big promises are scarce. The front-runner among the five challengers to Bouteflika, Ali Benflis, has promised to root out fraud and make politics more inclusive, but because of the calcified state of politics in the country, his promises are hard to believe. He is also highly unlikely to win the election.

Even diplomatically, Algeria has lost its zeal for championing the values that it spent many years conceiving and promoting. No possible outcome of Thursday’s elections will jar Algeria free from the hole it is currently in — which explains why there is a great deal of indifference to the whole process there.

The Algerian view of the Arab Spring informs the lack of widespread dissent over the continuation of a status quo state of gradual decline. The Arab Spring, it is widely thought, is the product of a Western neo-imperial conspiracy aiming to weaken, fracture and destroy Arab states so as to break open easier access to natural resources. At a time when states in Libya, Egypt and Syria are fighting for their lives, there is still reason to expect not just stability but greatness from Algeria, which remains anchored, filled with foreign-exchange receipts, national chauvinism and a great deal of sheer, undirected force.

The tragic interpretation of Algerian history — which, when taught in local schools, begins with the revolution — is that each new power repeats the mistakes of the old. The colonized becomes the colonizer, and a new wave of resistance must rise up and shed much blood in the name of freedom and new beginnings. But this is not the only interpretation, and the fact remains that Algeria is still a faded site of revolutionary fervor. Is Algeria doomed to repeat the mistakes of its past or destined to relive the splendor of its beginnings?