6 - Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The Herculean Task of Civilianising the Algerian State

Summary

The Algerian protest movement known as the Hirak that began in February 2019 as a mass demonstration against a nearly comatose President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term jolted the Algerian state out of its long years of stupor. Indeed, not since the massive protests and riots of October 1988, which up-ended the country's long-standing one-party rule was the Algerian state confronted with the untenability of a status quo marked by languid leadership, notorious political scandals and grand corruption. The Hirak punctured the singular narrative of regime stability that the country's ruling elite had consistently told about itself, particularly since the system successfully weathered the wave of pro-democracy revolts commonly known as the Arab Spring that shook North Africa and the Middle East beginning in 2010 and 2011. The millions of demonstrators who flooded Algeria's streets also exposed the vulnerabilities in the regime's grasp on power. The Algerian regime's stability has been based mostly on the informal power-sharing arrangement crafted in 1999 between a dominant military, influential security services and the president's civilian entourage, and it has derived its legitimacy claims from an authoritarian populist ideology and a mythical revolutionary past. The equilibrium of this formula of governing and domination of state and society routinised under the reign of Bouteflika was disrupted in April 2019, when the late Ahmed Gaïd Salah, then army chief of staff and deputy minister of defence, forced the president to resign and jailed several of his political and business allies.

The withering away of the Bouteflika power structure, however, did not mean the break-down of the Algerian political system or the decomposition of its central characteristic: the military as the key source of political power. This primacy of the military establishment has defined post-colonial Algeria, even though it has taken different forms at different times. To be sure, the military's preponderance of power and its control of all the main dimensions of the state have not gone unchallenged, as the Hirak had shown most vividly with its persistent and loud calls for ‘a civilian state, not a military state’. The fate of earlier attempts to challenge the nature of the political system, however, offered a sobering preview of the enormity and ramifications of such a task in Algeria.