[Salon] Algeria Loses its Way - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Algeria Loses its Way Summary: a record low turnout in Algeria’s recent election is a reflection of how the North African state has failed its citizens while benefitting a select elite through a crony capitalist system and a stagnant status quo backed by the military. We thank Francis Ghilès for today’s newsletter. Francis is a senior associate research fellow at CIDOB and a visiting fellow at King’s College, London. You can find his latest Arab Digest podcast Algeria, Libya and Europe’s urgent energy needs here. Most of the polling stations in the major cities of Algeria were deserted during the general elections on 2 July 2026. As he announced the results the following day, the interim president of ANIE (Autorite Nationale Independente des Elections), Karim Khelfane congratulated himself on the “fairness and transparency” of the vote. Repeated entreaties by President Abdelmajid Tebboune had failed to convince 24m electors to “massively” cast their ballots. As 78% of those entitled to vote refused to do so, Khelfane added insult to injury, by pointing out that elections in Western democracies were also characterised by abstentions. In 2019 the army, which has held effective power in the country since independence in 1962, had opted for repression after months of peaceful protests. The movement known as the Hirak seven years ago brought millions of Algerians into the streets and forced the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. With Bouteflika gone, army chiefs refused to listen to the millions who week after week shouted “El Djazair jumhuriya, mashi mamlaka” (Algeria is a republic, not a monarchy). Coming after a brutal civil war in the 1990s and twenty years of the immensely corrupt Bouteflika presidency, Algerians hoped against hope that their leaders would treat them as citizens rather than subjects. By refusing to do so, the Algerian army has destroyed the historic legitimacy it once enjoyed thanks to its fight against the French coloniser. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune casts his ballot amid a record 78% voter abstention, highlighting deep public disillusionment with Algeria’s military-backed ruling elite. Crony capitalism rules The low voter turnout is a measure of how the reign of crony capitalism has robbed elections of any legitimacy. Algeria may comfortably live off its oil and gas exports and enjoy a GDP growth rate of 3.5%. But it has become a caricature of its former self as a leader of Third World emancipation and the fight against Western capitalism. The legendary Pan-African Festival of 1969 in Algiers with its passionate debates about the moral and political stakes involved in the creation of a postcolonial culture belong to prehistory (see Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-colonial Imagination, Jeremy Harding, Verso 2026). The dead hand of censorship and fear has fallen on a once vibrant capital city. Crony capitalism today characterises a country which has lost its way economically and diplomatically. According to one Algerian friend “the lacklustre performance of Algeria’s team at the football World Cup symbolises the drift of a country whose leaders have battened down the hatches, and live in constant fear of alleged foreign plots”. Unlike Moroccan and Chinese leaders, those who run Algeria are scared of their diaspora who are well-educated and well-travelled people, keen to experiment with new ideas, build on new technologies and join in the wider world of economic and cultural exchange. Meanwhile private Algerian businessmen close to the president and senior military officers offer perfect examples of crony capitalism. The huge investment in Saharan agriculture sums up the folly of it all. The state owned Algerian National Fund for Investment (FNI) and private Italian companies have jointly invested in producing durum wheat in the desert of southern Algeria pumping non-renewable water from deep underground aquifers. The wheat is exported to Italy. The FNI and a private Qatari company are investing US$500m to produce milk near the desert town of Adrar: in such temperatures, according to a leading Algerian expert, each cow requires 800 litres of water a day. The milk produced is transported 600 kilometres to the north to be conditioned and sold. Such absurd policies are strongly supported by Yacine Oualid, an IT specialist appointed Minister of Agriculture in 2025 who proclaims that to “digitalise agriculture” is a priority. The slogan makes many Algerians shake their heads in sheer disbelief. Lost opportunities The unwillingness of Algeria and Morocco to cooperate and build a chemical Maghreb explains why Algeria which boasts gas, sulphur and ammonia has failed to build a powerful fertiliser industry, one of the industrial success stories of the Gulf States. Morocco today is the world’s largest exporter of phosphate based-fertilisers and instead of using gas and sulphur from neighbouring Algeria and jointly producing ammonia with it, the kingdom is importing these feedstocks from far afield, including the Gulf. The missed opportunity to create a “powerful chemical Maghreb” has in the words of Amar Drissi, a former executive director of the Office Cherifien des Phosphates (OCP) - Morocco’s state phosphate company - deprived North Africa but particularly Algeria of a major source of jobs, fertiliser production and influence on food production worldwide. Chemical industries had started moving from Northern Europe to the Southern Hemisphere twenty years earlier. As a result Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia had already built a powerful petrochemical base to take advantage of the “major shift in demand, supply, competitiveness and long term margins that will further reshape the whole industry” Drissi notes. Since 2010, OCP has prospered by positioning itself in the international value chain of fertilisers. It has morphed from a “sleeping beauty” to a nimble international player. However Algeria refuses to insert itself in the global value chain for fear of becoming a “vassal state” in the words of one Algerian economist. The mining sector offers another illustration of crony capitalism. Foreign investors, essentially from Türkiye and China invest in the extraction of Algeria’s vast wealth in minerals - phosphates, copper, iron ore etc. Minerals are exported to the aforementioned countries without any attempt to add value in Algeria. The contrast with neighbouring Morocco ‘s policy of internationalising its economy has never been greater. Algerian foreign policy loses its way Algerian diplomacy was once renowned for its savviness and capacity to intermediate on crises in the Middle East and Iran. Helping release the US diplomats held hostage in Tehran in 1981 was a triumph. No longer. During the war in Gaza and following the US-Israeli attack on Iran, Algeria’s voice has not been heard. Relations remain tense with Morocco but what is new is that relations with Russia, Algeria’s major arms provider, have become tense following the intervention of the paramilitary Russian Africa Corps in Mali and other Sahel countries. Algeria was quick to denounce the intervention of French troops in Mali in 2013 but, in public at least, no criticism of Vladimir Putin is allowed even though events in the Sahel pose a significant threat to Algeria’s security. Algeria accuses the West of hypocrisy where human rights are concerned in particular on Palestine but remains silent on Putin’s Ukraine war and the presence of the Africa Corps in the Sahel countries. Meanwhile, young Algerians vote with their feet. A young academic who lives in Bejaia, due east of Algiers remarked that the only people left in the Berber villages in the Kabylia mountains behind this historic port were “old people and thieves”. As for the official fury at President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to shift France’s position on the vexed question of Western Sahara two years ago (which led to a bitter crisis between the two countries), he remarked that “the vast majority of Algerians had never been interested in the question, assuming they even knew where the place was on the map.” Relations with the US remain good despite Donald Trump’s recognition of the “Marocanité” of Western Sahara. One example: the EU recently bowed to pressure from US and Qatar insistence that Brussels should significantly weaken the enforcement of its flagship methane regulation. The US-Qatari letter to the EU was co-signed by Algeria and Nigeria. The EU’s reversal runs counter to advice from the International Energy Agency which has warned that methane escaping during fossil fuel production - the key issue the EU regulation seeks to tackle – wastes more gas than flows through the Strait of Hormuz (natural gas is predominantly methane). Algeria is making a serious efforts to reduce its own flaring fully appraised of the economic benefits of doing so. Backing the US and Qatar would seem to work against that effort. Conclusion In a context of diplomatic decline and economic follies, the details of which political parties won the most seats is pure shadow boxing. President Tebboune has secured a majority in a parliament which is no more than a rubber stamp. He might ask it to approve a change in the constitution so that he can “legally” stand for a third term. The vast majority of Algerians do not care because, since 2019 and the crushing of the Hirak, they consider their rulers with their caricature of democracy to be neither competent nor legitimate. Hence the abysmally low voter turnout of 2 July.