Bouteflika, Brotherhood confrontation determines fate of Algeria
Monday 11/February/2019 - 02:33 PM
Doaa Imam
In an expected and undesirable way to the Movement of Society for Peace (HMS),
the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria, President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika, announced his candidacy for the next session of the presidential
elections to be held in April.
This came a day after the public conference organized by the National Liberation Front Party last Saturday to announce the support of Bouteflika in the forthcoming presidential elections, in the presence of nearly 2000 leaders of the ruling party, most notably former Prime Minister Abdelmalik Sallal.
MB ambition
On the other hand, the Brotherhood has always described Bouteflika as the "sick president" in exchange for polishing the candidate of the group, Abdel-Razzaq Maqri, the president of HSM, aspiring to rule Algeria and who declared that his candidacy for the presidency is similar to the candidacy of the movement's founder, Mahfouz Nahna in 1995.
He said that if Bouteflika continues to waste money on imaginary projects, he claims that there are studies indicating that before 2021, only $30 billion of the reserves will remain. He added that in 2025 we will not find what we sell of oil, and this will force thousands of Algerians to ride the boats of death.
The head of the Brotherhood movement sent messages to the authority during meetings he attended for the purpose of electoral propaganda, including the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood has all the elements to get the country out of this situation outside the oil revenues. He said in a threatening tone, “Stability depends on reassuring the people of a real program and of changing the faces of the regime, otherwise, if the same faces continue, the generations will be impatient and what everyone fears will happen.”
Four April battles
In April 1999, Bouteflika ran for Algeria's presidency, along with six candidates who withdrew a day before the ballot on April 15, 1999, and according to official figures obtained 70 percent of the vote.
Bouteflika reappeared in the April 2004 elections, preceded by a political alliance in February of the same year known as the "presidential alliance".
Bouteflika also ran for a third term in April 2009 under a constitutional amendment that abolished the previous limitation on the number of presidential mandates by only two. Bouteflika remained in power; he won a landslide victory in the presidential election with more than 90 percent of the vote. That means that about 13 million voters supported the survival of the President in power for five new years.
The April 2014 elections also left Bouteflika with a fourth term of more than 82 percent of the votes, compared to the loss of presidential candidate Ali Benflis, a former prime minister, with 12.18 percent of the vote and opposition candidate Louisa Hanoun with 1.37%.
Algerians are waiting for the results of the upcoming presidential election to see whether Bouteflika will complete a quarter century of rule or whether April will come a new way for Algeria.
