The Algerians did not then want to take part in this umpteenth joke: seven out of ten of them avoided yesterday these preposterous elections by which the Algerian political power invited them to play the role of the simpleton. A record in the popular disavowal never known since the Independence. A snub resounding when one knows that the true abstention rate is not 74, 5%, as announced last night, but 88%.

I see three lessons in this serious political rout.

First of all, the gap between the population and the regime has considerably widened to become today a terrible reality, a disturbing reality. The abstention record was due neither to the Al-Qaida call nor to the movements favouring boycott. This is the result of a divorce between the Algerians and their leaders. Final. Massive. Brutal. The regime promised too much without keeping its promises. Too many lies. The beautiful speeches as the preceding ballots did not change the situation of the Algerian people. Unemployment is still there, evil life is still there, despair is still there.

The Algerians did not vote because they do not believe anymore in the changes through elections. And Khalifa’s trial gave the finishing stroke: it showed the Algerian political system, to the eyes of the opinion, in its true nature, that of a corrupt regime. How one has been able to believe to be able to persuade the citizen to vote for a political personnel that he is unaware of or, worse still, that he despises? The democratic parties and the republican personalities that chose to take part in this parody showed a total ignorance of their society. They are, once more, “mistaken about their society”, but in a way that they did not suspect. The society was, this time, more ahead of them. More conscious of the reality. More insightful.

This unprecedented failure then points at the bleeding wound: the distress of the youth. It is especially them who did not vote yesterday. The new generation does not listen anymore to its leaders. It ruminates its misfortune and takes refuge, for the moment, in the ordinary ways out: the drug, the exile dream or the makeshift trabendo. But, at any moment, and the blasts of April 11 showed it, it can tip in Violence and terrorism. Let us think…

This rout is, finally, the President Bouteflika’s personal failure. Algeria is paying the price of an arrogant, blind, insubstantial and absolutist strategy imposed by an untruly elected president. Every day that Bouteflika and his circle pass at the head of the country will be a day of an unrecoverable past. The president did all the evil that he has been able to do. The country is kneeling.

So, what conclusion to draw from these grotesque ballots? Only one: the regime must launch a true political change, a true republican alternation, if it wants to avoid chaos to the country and carry, consequently, a catastrophic responsibility in history. Today, with the help of a still watchful society, with the democratic forces still intact and with the European help, this change is still possible in the consensus. Tomorrow, it will be too late. For everybody.

Written by: Mohamed Benchicou
Source: http://benchicou.unblog.fr
Translated from French by D. Messaoudi