LOCAL ELECTIONS MARRED BY IRREGULARITIES,

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 ALGIERS 001749

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/05/2022
TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM AG
SUBJECT: LOCAL ELECTIONS MARRED BY IRREGULARITIES,
MANIPULATION AND CHARGES OF FRAUD

REF: A. ALGIERS 1662

B. ALGIERS 1658

C. ALGIERS 1727 (AND PREVIOUS)

D. ALGIERS 1629

Classified By: Ambassador Robert S. Ford; reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).


1. (C) SUMMARY: The November 29 local elections in Algeria,
while publicly hailed by the Ministry of Interior and Prime
Minister as a success, were marred by accusations of
irregularities, fraud, controlled media access and charges of
intimidation of opposition parties. The results were
noteworthy for the poor showing by Islamist parties both
within and outside the ruling coalition, and for the strong
showing by the previously unimportant Algerian National Front
(FNA),which finished in third place overall behind the
National Liberation Front (FLN) and National Democratic Rally
(RND). While official turnout statistics showed figures of
roughly 44 percent, our election monitors in Algiers, Oran
and in selected areas of northern Algeria and the Kabylie
region gave a figure significantly lower than that, perhaps
as low as 30 percent. Overall turnout appears nonetheless to
have been higher than the May legislative elections, with
very low urban turnout in contrast to higher rural turnout,
driven primarily by local and tribal ties rather than faith
in the political system. Youth and Islamist voters appear
largely to have abstained except in the Kabylie, where youth
turnout was strong. Local media also reported scattered
protests and violence in the western provinces of Oran,
Tlemcen and Mascara on election day. The results were
predictable, and may indeed have laid the groundwork for a
2008 call to revise the constitution in order to allow
President Bouteflika to run for a third term. In these local
elections, we saw the same kinds of process problems that
enable government manipulation of the results that we have
seen here in elections here since the 1990s. The
government's choice not to address such problems is worrisome
for the development of Algerian democracy. END SUMMARY.

MONITORING: TRICKY, EVEN WHEN UNIMPEDED
--------------


2. (C) In the absence of an independent monitoring commission
(ref A) or international observers, election monitoring was
left to the political parties themselves, and to our own
ad-hoc monitoring effort using Embassy staff and contacts
across north-central Algeria, the Kabylie and Oran. In one
case, one of our local employees served as the volunteer
voting director for the entire day at a school in the
lower-middle class Algiers district of El Magharia, Hussein
Dey. Our staff, both Algerian and American, observed over 30
different polling stations at various times of the day, but
30 to 40 percent of them were denied access in an often
brusque manner. Political parties faced the same challenges
as they tried to monitor the elections. Said Sadi, outspoken
president of the opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy
(RCD),a traditionally Berber party, told us December 3 that
RCD representatives were physically prevented from observing
the balloting in Tebessa, Chlef and Collo. Sadi, along with
Hamid Lounaouci, RCD national secretary responsible for
institutional relations, said that they had been on the phone
with their representative in Tebessa as he banged on the door
of the local polling station demanding access. Sadi also
charged that the RCD's victorious candidates in Talassa, a
township in the district of Chlef, had been threatened by the
local administrator against assuming their elected positions.
(Note: This event may have had more to do with the local FLN
administrator's fear of being exposed if new RCD
representatives made good on their promise to publicize local
records, which Sadi and Lounaouci said were full of evidence
of corruption. End Note.)


3. (C) Our observers did report seeing opposition parties
such as the RCD, Socialist Forces Front (FFS) and Worker's
Party (PT) present to monitor the elections, but given the
superior resources of the ruling coalition FLN and RND,
observers from these two parties were a more widespread
presence than those of any other party. Abdelmajid Menasra,
vice president of the Islamist (Muslim Brotherhood) Movement
for a Society of Peace (MSP),told us December 2 that the FLN
and RND had the fewest problems sending their representatives
to observe polling stations. Menasra said that

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representatives of the MSP, the lone Islamist party in the
three-party ruling coalition, were also prevented from
monitoring the voting at several locations around Algiers,
but that "it was not as big of a mess as the May elections."
Meanwhile, a MEPI-sponsored program on election monitoring
suffered the same effects of these increased sensitivities.
The local project implementer told us November 20 that she
was struggling to find election monitors because the Algerian
university professors who were supposed to coordinate a
significant monitoring presence at polling stations around
the country had backed down. They refused to go to the
stations on election day because "they said they were afraid
of the security services."

OFFICIAL TURNOUT FIGURES INFLATED
--------------


4. (C) Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni announced on November
30 that official turnout across the country was approximately
44 percent, yet not a single one of our election monitors
reported seeing people waiting in line to vote. The voting
director at El Magharia in Hussein Dey, Algiers, reported
that 60 people voted out of a possible 400 registered voters,
for a turnout of 15 percent. Most of these, he observed,
were elderly. Other observers noted groups of people
standing around at polling places, with plenty of typical
weekend activity going on in the neighborhood, but with
nobody actually voting. Anecdotal reports from our observers
and party representatives such as Sadi, Menasra and Hocine
Djeddai, former first secretary of the FFS, reveal a very low
turnout in urban areas but a higher turnout based on what
Djeddai called "tribal ties" at the local level. A political
observer in Oran echoed this, noting that in rural areas the
APC (local city council) is often the provider of basic
services and therefore its composition is far more relevant
to daily life than it is to a resident of Algiers or Oran.
Our contact in Oran visited several polling stations around
the city, and observed that by 3:00 PM at one station, only
90 out of approximately 1000 voters had cast their ballots --
a figure that matches what our monitors observed and stands
in stark contrast to the official statistics. Even the
Algerian Government's official figures put turnout in Algiers
at 24 percent and in Oran it was officially 37 percent. In
addition, among the roughly eight million said to have cast
votes, some 900,000 were nullified, many apparently by the
voters themselves as a protest vote.

ADDING UP VOTES BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
--------------


5. (C) All of the political party contacts we spoke to said
that while they enjoyed varying degrees of access to the
polling stations during voting and counting, none of them was
allowed to observe the compilation of the votes going up the
administrative chain. Sadi of the RCD described the process
as one in which votes are counted once at the local level in
private, then sent up to the wilaya (provincial) level to be
counted again, before being sent to the Interior Ministry in
Algiers. At no stage in the vote compilation process, Sadi
said, is there any independent observation. Djeddai and
Menasra described the process in the same way, saying that
neither the FFS or MSP had access to the vote compilation
process, and that numbers had a way of "growing" at each
successive stage. Because of this phenomenon, Djeddai
pointed out on December 4, it is conceivable that after votes
are added at the local and wilaya levels, the final
statistics that arrive at the Interior Ministry in Algiers
actually did indicate a 44 percent turnout, even though that
turnout was some 10 to 15 percent higher than reality on the
ground.

CHANGING THE RULES AFTER THE FACT
--------------


6. (C) Two days after the election, Interior Minister
Zerhouni announced that the leadership of a local council
would go to the candidate heading the list of the party that
received the most votes. Local elections in Algeria do not
produce a winner-take-all outcome; rather, seats and control
of local and wilaya councils are roughly proportionate to the
level of support the parties gain in the election. While
party officials such as Menasra and Djeddai conceded that

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assigning control based on majority vote was a democratic
decision in principle, they stressed that this should have
been announced before the elections and not after. Sadi and
Lounaouci of the RCD were outraged, as previously the
leadership position of a council had been assigned to the
eldest candidate from any of the parties who won a percentage
of the vote. They said that the RCD had prepared
accordingly, with slates of candidates designed to gain more
leadership positions by placing more senior and respected
local figures on their lists. According to Djeddai and press
reports, this decision was also rejected by the Tuareg tribes
of the south, although for the Tuareg it was less a matter of
electoral transparency than a blow to tradition. Djeddai
said it was inconceivable for a Tuareg to allow young people
with political majorities to rule, reducing their elders on
the council to a non-executive role.

CONTROLLED MEDIA ACCESS
--------------


7. (C) According to Djeddai, opposition parties such as his
FFS, the RCD and Islah had not had access to state-controlled
television before the election season. In the three weeks
immediately prior to the elections, state television featured
a daily half-hour block of time devoted entirely to political
messages, in which each party was given roughly three minutes
of time. Menasra referred to this as "a parade" of messages,
trotted out before the viewer in this organized manner at the
same time every day. Djeddai, whose FFS fared poorly due
primarily to internal divisions, pointed out that several
minutes of allotted time every day for three weeks was not
enough to level the playing field when for the rest of the
year leading up to this period, they were not given the
necessary access to build an identity and a message in the
mind of the electorate.

THE SPECIAL CASE OF THE KABYLIE
--------------


8. (C) Several of our observers voted and monitored polling
stations in the wilaya of Tizi Ouzou, in the heart of the
troubled Kabylie region. In the municipalities of Azzaga and
Beni Yenni, which have traditionally supported the RCD and
FFS, respectively, the turnout of young voters (under 30
years of age) was significant and represented a majority of
those who voted. Sadi confirmed this, saying that the youth
turnout in Kabylie was far higher than in the rest of the
country. He attributed this to a desire to break the cycle
of lawlessness that has gripped the region since 2001.
Political scientist Rachid Tlemcani told us December 3 that,
in contrast to other parts of the country where voter apathy
is attributed to a loss of faith in the state, in Kabylie
there is actually a desire, particularly among the younger
generation, for the central government to return and
re-establish law and order. While the RCD predictably won
the elections in Azzaga, the ruling coalition RND carried
Beni Yenni after the FFS withdrew its slate owing to deep
internal disagreements over whose names to put on the list,
according to our observer in Tizi Ouzou.

THE WILD WEST
--------------


9. (U) Meanwhile, the overt fighting within and between rival
parties of the ruling coalition in the far west of Algeria
that we reported in ref B continued on election day, as the
RND and FLN struggled for control against each other and
against their leadership in Algiers. Press reports featured
15 separate incidents of protests around the country related
to the elections, eight of which were concentrated in the
wilayas of Tlemcen, Mascara and Relizane. (Note: An
additional four or five incidents in various parts of the
country were violent clashes between the police and citizens
who had sought shelter the night before in the schools
scheduled to be used as voting stations. Intense rains
during the week prior to the elections had caused flooding
and extensive property damage, forcing emergency shelter to
become a more immediate issue than the elections. End Note.)
The press reports, from El Khabar, Echourouk el Youmi and El
Watan, said that crowds angry over election results set fire
to the APC offices in the towns of Kalaa and Ain Rahma in the
wilaya (province) of Relizane, while others burned the APC

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offices in Mekhtaria, wilaya of Ain Defla. Supporters of the
RND, according to Echourouk el Youmi on December 1, took a
local FLN candidate and the mayor hostage for several hours
in Bourached, also in the wilaya of Ain Defla. On December
1, Echourouk el Youmi reported that rumors of election fraud
by the FLN in Ras El Ma, wilaya of Sidi Belabbes, caused
election candidates themselves to throw stones at the APC
offices.

COMMENT: THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS
--------------


10. (C) The Interior Ministry secured an outcome seemingly
designed to reinforce the ruling coalition's grip on the
country. The results were predictable, and may indeed have
laid the groundwork for a 2008 call to revise the
constitution in order to allow President Bouteflika to run
for a third term (ref D). The problems we heard about the
November 29 local elections process are consistent with the
problems in the electoral process we have previously reported
(ref C),further reinforcing the conclusion that the outcome
of the elections was heavily managed by the Interior
Ministry. Control of media access, micro-managing and
manipulating lists of approved candidates, inflating turnout
statistics, sometimes obstructing opposition party observers
at the initial vote count and always obstructing access in
vote compilations are old problems in the Algerian election
process. In the 2007 local elections, there have been fewer
problems with procedures like political party observers
watching the actual voting or watching the counts of votes
out of the vote boxes, but the other problems seem never to
improve. That choice not to fix essential procedures does
not bode well for the development of Algerian democracy.
FORD