Look at the friend again, are you sure I disappeared? Ahmed is annoyed, standing behind the town hall official who scrolls through the long lists of the electoral roll. “No, you forgot to register in fact,” replied the official to Ahmed, in his forties, plumber, living in this district of El Ghouazi, in Baraki, south of Algiers. “It’s stupid, I wanted to vote this time and I thought I would do it with my identity card,” he smiles fatefully. Why vote? “I have never voted before, it was thieves who ran the system. Now, we have the impression that there has been cleaning, ”he replies before leaving this transformed primary school class, the time of an election, annexed to the town hall. “We are checking the list name by name. It is an infallible computer system. Impossible to cheat to vote twice, for example, ”the official is satisfied, crushing his cigarette in an empty cup of coffee.
Low attendance
On this hot spring Saturday, some 24 million Algerians must elect the 407 new deputies of the National People’s Assembly (APN, lower house of Parliament) for a five-year term. In the school yard centered around the flag pole, there was little animation on this Saturday afternoon, June 12. In the two polling stations, on the first floor of the school (one for men, the other for women), the attendance is low under the gaze of assessors and representatives of the candidates who doze off under the overwhelming pre-summer heat. “Everything is going well, even if we are reported to some overruns elsewhere,” says Racha, a young student representative of an independent list, notebook with empty pages in hand.
Outside, the start of a heatwave descends mercilessly on the neighborhood wedged between a motorway and a national road. Lamine runs a tobacco-newspapers-perfume-phone recharge kiosk, he doesn’t believe in voting at all: “My party is my pocket. I see what goes in and what goes out as money. With taxes and the high cost of living, I earn less and less, ”slices this thirty-something, defying the gaze of the three police officers who have taken refuge under the shade of a single tree at the entrance to the polling center.
Aïcha, mother of a family, accompanied by her young son, is not of the same opinion. Crossed at the exit of the polling center, she hesitates to speak in front of the police officers, then she launches out: “I vote for my country, we want stability above all, the rest, we will see. ” Other ladies, often accompanied by children or elderly people holding their voter cards, flock very sparingly to the polling station. At that time (around 4 p.m.), the participation rate in Algiers was, officially, only 5.65%, while at the national level the average was 10.02%.
Clashes in Kabylia
The atmosphere is less calm in Kabylia: clashes with the police, riots, closures of polling stations. As in previous elections, the wilayas (prefectures), Béjaïa, Tizi Ouzou and Bouira, experienced a very low turnout, and in some villages the “zero vote” target was reached. According to Saïd Salhi, vice-president of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, “most of the polling stations in Tizi Ouzou and Béjaïa were closed at 11 am”! “How dare to talk about an election when the repression savagely hits the militants”, gets annoyed on the phone an activist from Béjaïa. Several arrests, in particular of two journalists, Khaled Drareni and Ihsane El Kadi, of an opponent, Karim Tabbou (released after about 30 hours), preceded the day of the vote. “I am not voting with a gun on my head”, supports a hirak activist met in Algiers-center at the end of election day.
Low participation of Algerians abroad
The voting operation, like the previous ones, was extended by one hour, until 8 p.m. In this polling center, in a school in Telemely, in the center of the capital, Idriss, an official of the Independent National Election Authority (ANIE), confides that the turnout remains low: “Very few people in the morning, a small rebound in the afternoon and at the end of the day, ”he summarizes.
In the evening, after a first count, the ANIE announced a national participation rate – provisional – of 30.20%. Unofficial sources tell Point Afrique that the participation rates of Algerians abroad are expected to be particularly low. As a reminder, several activist sit-ins to denounce these elections were organized near the Algerian consulates in France or elsewhere, in Montreal in particular. During the last legislative elections of May 2017, the final rate of participation was 35.70%, while the presidential election of December 2019, which brought Abdelmadjid Tebboune to power, recorded only 40% of the vote, a record abstention for this kind of election.
Partisan mapping turned upside down
“For me, the turnout doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that those for whom the people vote have sufficient legitimacy, ”declared President Tebboune in the middle of the day during an impromptu press briefing after having voted. “A low participation rate coupled with the bursting of electoral lists (1,200 independent lists, a record, and 22,550 candidates in all) can create surprises. Partisan mapping will be completely upset, ”attests a press correspondent from the west of the country contacted by telephone.
Complicated counting and late results
The profusion of lists and the new voting procedure consisting in choosing a candidate from the list (instead of choosing a closed list) will complicate counting operations and delay the announcement of results, according to ANIE. The results could not be stopped until Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. In the meantime, forecasts are going well concerning the composition of the next government resulting from these legislative elections. “As the Constitution speaks of a parliamentary majority and not of a coalition, the next government remains an unknown, with two variants: a coalition, Islamist for example, can form the government, but the president can read article 110 again and maintain Djerad [l’actuel Premier ministre] by asking him to recruit from both sides, ”said political scientist and journalist Abed Charef.
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