July Algeria monthly situation report (Part I)

ALGERIA MONTHLY SITUATION REPORT

July 25, 2012

Executive Summary

Political Trends

· The newly elected parliament has gone into summer recess without having discussed any laws or constitutional issues or taken a single vote on any matter.

· There is still no new government and President Bouteflika has begun his annual performance-evaluation interviews with the ‘interim’ ministers.

· With Ahmed Ouyahia reportedly ruled out, the main sticking point in selecting a new government appears to be the choice of prime minister.

· With the political reform process looking increasingly irrelevant, there has been some speculation that President Bouteflika may not bow out in 2014 after all and opt to run for a fourth successive term of office.

· Bouteflika and France’s newly elected President Hollande have exchanged letters which tentatively look beyond the sterile dispute over official declarations relating to the colonial period which has been a blockage in Franco-Algerian relations.

· French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius visited Algiers in mid-July, and is now talking of a possible official visit by Hollande at the end of this year, during which a new “very high-level partnership” might be signed.

· Paris’ most urgent imperative is to bring Algeria on board with international moves to crush the hardline islamist entity in northern Mali, but Algiers is reluctant to either give its assent to an intervention by French troops or commit troops of its own to a potentially destabilising adventure.

· The need to secure Algerian cooperation in northern Mali may be one reason behind perceived shifts in the French government’s attitude towards Morocco, notably on the Western Sahara question. Another may be efforts to persuade Algeria to mobilise its considerable hard currency reserves in support of international financial bail-out funds.

· Levels of violence dipped in June but rose again in July, as jihadist groups geared up for Ramadan, seen as a particularly propitious period for jihad.

· AQMI split-off MUJAO has carried out another suicide bombing against a gendarmerie facility in the south of the country.

· In light of the threat of MUJAO launching attacks against oil and gas installations in the south, the authorities have reportedly stepped up security around facilities in and around the Hassi Rmel gas hub, and are evaluating advanced electronic surveillance systems for the southern borders.

On July 2, the parliament that elected in May in what was supposed to be a key step in the process of political and institutional reform, went into summer recess, without having discussed a single law or taken a single vote on any issue. Neither had it had the chance to see in the long-awaited new government – which three weeks later has still not been formed. Indeed, the very idea of naming a new prime minister and cabinet has effectively been pushed back until after the summer break: on July 22 Bouteflika launched the round of performance-evaluation interviews with cabinet members that he holds every year during Ramadan, regardless of the fact that they are technically only caretaker ministers, in a clear sign that he is in no hurry to announce a new line-up.

There have been suggestions in the Algerian press that the delay in forming a new cabinet is chiefly due to the refusal of the various political parties with representation in the new parliament to join a coalition government. But there have been few signs of any real negotiations or even active attempts to persuade parties hitherto in the opposition to come on board, and it ought to have been possible for the Presidency and the DRS to pull together a cabinet from the FLN and the RND, which together have a clear majority, had the will existed. True, both the FLN and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the RND remain riven with internal crises, as are virtually all of Algeria’s political parties (the moderate islamist MSP, having withdrawn from the ruling coalition, is facing a minor split led by former Public Works Minister Amar Ghoul, precisely over the question of participation in government). But the biggest sticking point is doubtless the choice of Prime Minister, insofar as this risks being widely interpreted – rightly or wrongly – as an indication of the regime’s choice of successor for Bouteflika. Discussing the issue towards the end of June – at which time they claimed a new government would be unveiled “soon” – usually candid sources close to the Presidency were somewhat cagey, although they did seem adamant that Ouyahia would not be reappointed. In this sense, the continued delay in choosing a new Prime Minister underlines the fact that, with Ouyahia out of the running, there is no obvious successor to Bouteflika. Candidates who are now being considered for the position of Prime Minister – the name of Abdelmalek Sellal, currently Minister of Water Resources, has been floated by sources – appear to be compromise figures, probably lacking presidential stature.

Such is the impasse that there is now rising speculation in the Algerian media that President Bouteflika may not bow out at the end of his current term of office, as has been generally assumed for some time, and could instead seek to embark of a fourth term of office. Given Bouteflika’s declining vigour this may not be the most likely scenario, and it would certainly be at variants with the perceived message of his May 8 speech in Setif (see previous reports), in which he seemed to indicate that the time had come for his generation to hand over the reins of power to the post-independence generations. But the very fact that such a scenario is now being seriously discussed is testimony to just how sclerotic the Algerian political system is. Promises to reform it now seem increasingly irrelevant: although the initial plan unveiled by Bouteflika in April 2011 (and to which he continues, on occasion, to pay lip-service) was to have the newly elected parliament propose constitutional amendments which might then be submitted to approval by referendum, there was no discussion whatsoever of constitutional matters in the two short months the new parliament sat before breaking up for the summer, the constitutional reform committee that was supposed to generate ideas and proposals has not been established, and it is widely assumed that the whole process has been postponed until a later, and unspecified, date.

In the meantime, Bouteflika has been officiating over the celebrations to mark the first 50 years of Algeria’s independence, and over the military promotions ceremony which coincides every year with independence day. For such a momentous date, Algeria’s 50th anniversary celebrations were on the whole surprisingly low-key. Neither were the military promotions particularly spectacular, but they did in their quiet way mark another step in the generational shift within the armed forces and the all-important DRS – as exemplified by the elevation of Gen. Bachir Tartag, who took over as head of the DRS’s crucial Directorate of Internal Security at the end of last year, to the rank of major-general.