ALGIERS – Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika won 90.24 per cent of the vote in the presidential election, officials said yesterday, extending his hold over the country – an oil producer with a lingering Islamist insurgency.
The result gives Mr Bouteflika (72) a third five-year term as president and leaves him in power until 2014.
But some in the opposition alleged massive fraud and militants attacked a polling station on Thursday, underscoring the challenges which Mr Bouteflika still faces from sections of Algeria’s population, disillusioned by poverty and joblessness.
“The elections took place despite some incidents and attempts to disrupt them. This is a victory for the Algerian nation as it builds democracy,” interior minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said as he announced the results.
“Even if one were to concede that there were some irregularities [during the vote], that would not have had a significant effect on the result,” Mr Zerhouni said.
Mr Bouteflika’s nearest rival, Trotskyist candidate Louisa Hannoune, won 4.22 per cent of the votes cast, he said.
The interior ministry had already announced that turnout was just over 74 per cent, higher than in the last presidential vote and an indication that many of Algeria’s 34 million people did not heed opposition calls for a boycott.
“The high turnout means that the supporters of the boycott have neither political nor social influence,” said Mohamed Lagab, professor of political science at Algiers University.
Victory for Mr Bouteflika, a veteran of Algeria’s war for independence from France, was never in doubt. He faced only lightweight rivals in the ballot and had a well-funded campaign that plastered the capital with his posters. Lawmakers cleared the way for him to stand for a third term by abolishing term limits, a move that critics said could allow him to serve as president for life.
The opposition Front of Socialist Forces, which boycotted the vote, accused the authorities of artificially inflating the turnout. “[There was] a real tsunami of massive fraud which reached an industrial scale,” the party said in a statement.
Supporters say Mr Bouteflika deserves credit for steering Africa’s second largest country back to stability after the government and Islamists fought a civil conflict that killed an estimated 150,000 people in the 1990s.
Some sections of the population feel disenfranchised from the political process, however, and analysts say this helps feed the low-level Islamist insurgency, now affiliated to al-Qaeda, that is still rumbling on in Algeria. – (Reuters)