Disgruntled Algerians go to polls

Algiers Parliamentary elections in Algeria are being billed as the fairest in 20 years, but as polls opened Thursday disgruntled Algerians appeared to be showing little interest and even outright scorn for the vote.

There are 44 political parties competing for 462 seats across this vast oil-rich North African nation of 35 million people, Africa's largest by area. Some 500 international observers are monitoring an election the government has promoted as vital to the country's future and key to constitutional reform.

But most Algerian are distrustful of politics and largely ignored a three-week campaigning period that ended last Sunday. Party rallies were rarely full and in some cases candidates were heckled and even pelted with rocks by a disaffected citizens.

The main competitors in the election are two government affiliated parties squaring off against a three-party bloc of Islamist parties known as the ‘Green Alliance.'

No party is expected to dominate the parliament, though the real question will be if the turnout surpasses the anaemic 35 per cent of 2007.

Those who did cast ballots evoked a sense of duty and the future of this nation that has lived through long years of an Islamist insurgency.

‘‘I am voting for my children, for their future, it's not for me,'' said Omar Blaeaki, an elderly retiree at a polling station at a stately old school in central Algiers.

‘Sincere and honest'

‘‘This time around it is more sincere and honest than before, we are voting like they do in America or France.'' There is a deep distrust of politicians and politics in Algiers after years of rigged elections and rubber-stamp parliaments that have done little more than approve the policies of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

The last truly fair elections in 1991 were dominated by a populist Islamist party known as the Islamic Salvation Front, but the military stepped in, cancelled the voting and banned the party, prompting more than a decade of civil war that killed an estimated 200,000.

No party has since been able to mobilise Algeria's disaffected citizens to the same degree.

The historic party of the independence fight from colonial ruler France, the National Liberation Front, with its deep network across the country, has since won the most seats.

‘‘I am voting for the country, to make things better, we had Al Qaida and terrorism but now it's better and it will get better with this election,'' said Mohammad Zemmouchi, a retiree, on the street outside a downtown polling station.

Inside, voters separate into men's and women's rooms and choose Xeroxed sheets of every party list. They take the sheets and an envelope into the voting booth, choose one and throw away the others, then place their choice into an envelope for deposit in a clear plastic ballot box.