Empty-handed, Tebboune starts premature electoral campaign

After four years in office without any major economic or diplomatic achievement, President Tebboune of Algeria has already started his premature electoral campaign touring the country.

In 2019, amid the pro-democracy protests that ousted ailing president Bouteflika, Tebboune was the civilian curtain of then Algerian kingmaker General Gaid Saleh.

Soon after the sudden death of Gaid Saleh, Tebboune survived a purge into Gaid Saleh men in the regime, by pledging allegiance to new military ruler Chengriha.

Since then, Algeria has imprisoned most of its businessmen in a context of low oil and gas prices that left the country on the verge of financial implosion. Had Putin delayed his invasion of Ukraine, Algeria could have been already in negotiations with the IMF for a structural adjustment.

Meanwhile, Tebboune’s administration indulged in diplomatic fanfare reaping a series of debacles, starting with western support for Morocco’s sovereignty over western Sahara to worsening ties between Algiers and its African neighbors. Not to mention the incapacity to join BRICS and the most recent failure of its anti-Morocco regional union with Tunisia and Libya.

At the economic level, Algeria’s economic edifice stands on one pillar: gas. The country’s oil production is derisory and its domestic consumption of gas increasingly undermines its capacity to export.

Tebboune had addressed the dim prospects by announcement effects that verges on insanity. He promises a GDP of 400 billion dollars soon, without explaining how a country that has a very weak industrial sector plans to do that.

At the social level, unemployment is surging as inflation hits households’ finances while water cuts are commonplace in the country’s west, where unrest is ongoing in cities such as Tiaret.

Tebboune’s first term “”is disastrous, whether it is his own or that of the military. The regime is experiencing the most repressive period in its short history. Public freedoms, already reduced, practically no longer exist. Parents are imprisoned to get fleeing sons to surrender to the authorities. Journalists are repressed, newspapers are closed as a result of maneuvers that fool no one, their bosses are imprisoned and those who finance them are intimidated or disgusted. Foreigners, whether they belong to the press or the NGO world, wait for months for visas that are rarely granted,” wrote Orient XXI in an op-ed.