Algeria: President Abdelaziz Bouteflika forced out of power

Quick summary of what is going on in Algeria:

Protests are currently ongoing in Algeria. The protests revolve around demands for their President, Adbelaziz Bouteflika, to resign and be replaced. He has been the president since 1999, two decades. He suffered a stroke in 2013 and has rarely been seen in public. He decided to run for a fifth term, which resulted in the protests.

With that . . .

On Tuesday (April 2nd), Lt. Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, the army chief of staff, told President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to leave office.

This is only my second blog post on Algeria and in my first one I speculated that the military would wait until they had a successor in place who would be acceptable to both the elite and the protestors. I guess not.



The Washington Post has this:

The protests were the starkest indicator yet that Bouteflika’s ouster, at the insistence of the country’s powerful military, has failed to satisfy the tens of thousands of Algerians who have staged massive anti-government protests over the past six weeks in this vast North African country . . . Protesters are more emboldened in seeking a dismissal of the remaining vestiges of the political order that has governed the country since it won independence from France in 1962 — and that is now widely derided for its cronyism and corruption.

The constitution calls for the head of the upper house of Parliament, Abdelkader Bensalah, to become interim leader until an election can be held. But Bensalah has also been a key Bouteflika ally. Also remaining in the political picture is Said Bouteflika, the president’s powerful brother, as well as other influential Bouteflika backers.

It seems that those in power are still connected to Bouteflika: be it the head of the upper house of Parliament or the former president's brother. I honestly would have thought the military would have looked somewhere else, especially since the protests were by all account peaceful.

In my first blog post on the country, I had quoted the argument that the military looked uncertain on how to deal with this politically. They decided to take a firm stance but telling the president to resign, but at least as of Friday (April 5th) it doesn't seem like they had thought things through beyond that point. Let's see how this goes.