Meet the Candidates in Algeria's September 7 Presidential Elections
Incumbent President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is widely expected to win, but looking at the other candidates tells us something about political space in the country.
Algeria is holding presidential elections on September 7. Incumbent President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is seeking re-election and is almost certain to win.
Here are this year’s candidates:
Incumbent President Tebboune (born 1945), an independent candidate supported by the historic ruling party the National Liberation Front (FLN) and others. Tebboune is from Naâma Province (northwestern Algeria) and was educated as an administrator. He graduated in 1969 and then spent the 1970s and 1980s working as a top official at the local and provincial level, eventually serving as governor in three different provinces. Starting in 1991, he was appointed to ministerial posts, including five years as Housing Minister (2012-2017) and a three-month stint as Prime Minister (2017). He emerged in 2019 as a kind of insider reformist, promising a “new Algeria.”
Abdelaali Hassani Cherif (born 1966) of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP), Algeria’s main recognized Islamist party. Hassani, from M’Sila Province (central northern Algeria), was trained as an engineer and later as a lawyer. He was elected to the provincial legislature of M’Sila in 2002 and then to the National Popular Assembly in 2007. He served as national secretary of the MSP from 2013-2023, and then as its president and now its presidential candidate. You can read some background on the MSP, which was founded in 1990, here. The MSP is the second-largest party in parliament after the FLN, and saw major gains in the 2021 parliamentary elections.
Youssef Aouchiche (born 1983) of the Socialist Forces Front (French acronym FFS). Aouchiche, from Tizi Ouzou Province (far central northern Algeria), was trained in political science and international relations. He worked as a journalist and then as a parliamentary staffer. A longtime FFS member, he was elected as president of Tizi Ouzou’s provincial assembly in 2017, and then was elected as a senator in 2022. I could not find a recent standalone reading on the FFS, but it is one of Algeria’s oldest opposition parties.
The candidates are different ideologically and they belong to three different generations but it is also worth noting some basic commonalities among them: they are all university-educated professionals from the north, and they are all men.
As I said above, there is little suspense about who will win. Yet one of my running interpretations of elections in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts is that the results - even when the winner seems completely predictable - shed some light on (1) the makeup of the political arena in the country and (2) how the authorities view that arena and wish it to be viewed by the population and by foreigners.
Let’s look at some variations on how that can work. In successive Syrian presidential elections, for example, it has been clear that the incumbent presidents wished to send a message of total or near-total dominance. Syrian elections repeatedly featured the incumbent as the sole candidate; even when other candidates were present, the incumbent always claimed scores upwards of 90%. In contrast, in Mauritania, an electoral landscape dominated by former military officers has nevertheless preserved some space for opposition currents. In Mauritania in 2019 and 2024, for example, it was clear that Mohamed Ould Ghazouani (ruling party candidate in 2019, incumbent president in 2024) would win, but it was significant that the outspoken anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid placed second both times (with 18.5% in 2019 and 22% in 2024) and that an Islamist-backed candidate placed third times (with 18% in 2019 and 13% in 2024). I don’t know that it’s as simple as incumbents sitting in an office and allocating vote shares with no relationship to actual votes cast, but the relative shares that opposition candidates take can, again, tell us something about how the authorities see the relative strength of those currents within the society and within politics, and about whether they wish politics to be seen as competitive/non-competitive, open/closed, etc.
Post-1992 Algeria has sometimes posted Syria-esque numbers for the incumbent, but has also sometimes seen less lopsided results:
Note that the lowest scores for the winner came in the context of transitional elections marking the shift from one political settlement to the next.
Without getting too deep into the history, there are two key shifts to note: (1) Algeria experienced a very bloody civil war from approximately 1991-2002, and the elections of 1995 and 1999 came amid and as part of authorities’ attempts to regain control and, in the late 1990s, wind down tensions; (2) Algeria saw a mass protest movement in 2019 called the Hirak, which responded to (a) Bouteflika’s medical incapacitation and fifth term plans and (b) widespread disappointment with Algeria’s economy and politics. Authorities responded to the Hirak with a mixture of concessions (including the resignation of Bouteflika) and repression, as well as elections that sought to hit the reset button and that were won by Tebboune.
A related question concerns who is allowed to run in the first place. Algeria is not Iran, but an observation often made about Iran is worth mentioning here - namely, that election outcomes in Iran are determined first and foremost at the candidate screening stage, which then narrows the field to regime-approved figures for the actual vote, including regime-approved reformists.
In Algeria, the electoral field is actually smaller than Iran’s was earlier this year and the competition is much less robust within that field. In both 2019 and 2024, the field in Algeria was narrowed dramatically from dozens of aspiring candidates to just a handful of approved ones (five in 2019, three in 2024). In 2019, “all the candidates [were] products of the political establishment” and “the opposition [was] irrelevant.” This year, the field is even smaller but the opposition is more present. And it is noteworthy that Islamists and the left are the two officially sanctioned opposition forces in this election; to be a bit reductionist, the shape of this year’s contest feels like a gesture to two of the most important post-independence political currents in the country.
Finally, there is the question of why the opposition would participate. Running in an election you know you will lose is a fraught choice for the opposition anywhere - participate and you can get your message out, but you also risk looking (a) weak and possibly (b) coopted or at least domesticated. The MSP boycotted the elections of 2019, arguing that the contest lacked transparency and that the Hirak’s demands had gone unmet (the MSP also boycotted in 2014, when Bouteflika sought and won a fourth term); the FFS, by joining the 2024 contest, ends a quarter-century-long boycott of presidential elections. Participating this year can serve various goals for both parties, including positioning them for the anticipated 2026 parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, the biggest uncertainty concerning this year’s vote is turnout. In 2019, turnout hit a record low of 40%, followed by the even lower figure of 30% in the 2021 parliamentary elections (the lowest in twenty years for a legislative vote in Algeria). If turnout ends up low this year, it will give the impression of a discontented and disconnected electorate - which is perhaps one reason why the range of choices is wider this year than it was in 2019. Whether that will generate more excitement is unclear; the demands of the Hirak remain still unmet. To end with a quote from Luis Martinez and Rasmus Boserup (pp. 15-16):
Five years after its emergence, the Hirak movement has all but disappeared. Many of its protagonists are in prison or have fled into exile. And its core political aspirations have been blocked or rolled back. A new president, Abdelmajid Tebboune, largely considered an establishment-loyalist has been elected against the explicit wish of the Hirak. In short, the seasoned authoritarian regime seems for now to have endured.