Algerians expected an uneventful election that would bestow President Abdelmadjid Tebboune a second term. Instead, they got the president himself calling into question the vote count and legal challenges from his opponents alleging fraud.
Such a surprising turn of events marks a departure for Algeria, where elections have historically been carefully choreographed by the ruling elite and military apparatus that backs it.
The country’s constitutional court has until next week to rule on the appeals from Tebboune’s two opponents. But it’s anyone’s guess how questions about the election will be resolved, whether tallies will be re-tabulated and what it means for Tebboune’s efforts to project an image of legitimacy and popular support.
WHAT’S THE CONFUSION?
Algeria’s National Independent Election Authority, or ANIE, published figures throughout election day showing a low turnout. By 5 p.m. on Saturday, the reported turnout in Algeria was 26.5 percent — far fewer than had voted by that time in the election five years ago. After unexplained delays, it said “provisional average turnout” by 8 p.m. had spiked to 48 percent.
But the next day, it reported that only 5.6 million out of nearly 24 million voters had cast ballots — nowhere near 48 percent.
It said 94.7 percent voted to re-elect Tebboune. His two challengers — Abdelali Hassani Cherif of the Movement of Society for Peace and Youcef Aouchiche of the Socialist Forces Front — won a dismal 3.2 percent and 2.2 percent of the vote, respectively.
Cherif, Aouchiche and their campaigns subsequently questioned how results were reported and alleged foul play including pressure placed on poll workers and proxy voting.
None of that surprised observers.
But later, Tebboune’s campaign joined with his opponents in releasing a shared statement rebuking ANIE for “inaccuracies, contradictions, ambiguities and inconsistencies,” legitimizing questions about the president’s win and aligning him with popular anger that his challengers had drummed up.
Cherif and Aouchiche filed appeals at Algeria’s constitutional court on Tuesday after their campaigns further rebuked the election as “a masquerade.”
WHY IS VOTER TURNOUT CLOSELY WATCHED IN ALGERIA’S ELECTION?
Turnout is notoriously low in Algeria, where activists consider voting tantamount to endorsing a corrupt, military-led system rather than something that can usher in meaningful change.
Urging Algerians to participate in the election was a campaign theme for Tebboune as well as his challengers. That’s largely due to the legacy of the pro-democracy “Hirak” protests that led to the ouster of Tebboune’s predecessor.
After an interim government that year hurriedly scheduled elections in December 2019, protesters boycotted them, calling them rigged and saying they were a way for the ruling elite to handpick a leader and avoid the deeper changes demanded.
Tebboune, seen as the military’s preferred candidate, won with 58 percent of the vote. But more than 60 percent of the country’s 24 million voters abstained and his victory was greeted with fresh rounds of protests.
His supporters had hoped for a high turnout victory this year would project Tebboune’s popular support and put distance between Algeria and the political crisis that toppled his predecessor. It appears that gambit failed after only 5.6 million out of 24 million voters participated.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HIRAK PROTESTS?
In 2019, millions of Algerians flooded the streets for pro-democracy protests that became known as the “Hirak” (which means movement in Arabic).
Protesters were outraged after 81-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced plans to run for a fifth term. He had rarely been seen since a 2013 stroke left him paralyzed. The Hirak was jubilant but unsatisfied when Bouteflika resigned and top businessmen were charged with corruption. Protesters never coalesced around leaders or a new vision for Algeria, but called for deeper reforms to foster genuine democracy and remove from power members of what Algerians simply call “the power” — the elites from business, politics and the military thought to run the country.
Hirak protesters rejectedTebboune as a member of the old guard and interpreted most of his earlyovertures as empty gestures meant to placate them.
Before, during and after Tebboune’s election, protests continued. Then, COVID-19 hit and they were outlawed. Authorities continued to repress freedom of expression and imprison journalists and activists made famous by the pro-democracy movement, though protests restarted in 2021.
Figures from the Hirak denounced the 2024 election as a rubber stamp exercise to entrench Algeria’s status quo and called for another round of boycotts to express a deep lacking of faith in the system. Many said the high abstention rate in Saturday’s election proved Algerians were still aligned with their criticisms of the system.
“Algerians don’t give a damn about this bogus election,” said former Hirak leader Hakim Addad, who was banned from participating in politics three years ago. “The political crisis will persist as long as the regime remains in place. The Hirak has spoken.”
WHAT DOES TEBBOUNE QUESTIONING THE RESULTS MEAN?
Nobody knows. Few believe the challenges could lead to Tebboune’s victory being overturned.
Op-ed columnists and political analysts in Algeria have condemned ANIE, the independent election authority established in 2019, and its president Mohamed Charfi, for bungling elections that the government hoped would project its own legitimacy in the face of its detractors.
Hasni Abidi, an Algeria analyst at the Geneva-based Center for Studies and Research on the Arab World and Mediterranean, called it “a mess within the regime and the elite” and said it dealt a blow to both the credibility of institutions in Algeria and Tebboune’s victory.
Some argue his willingness to join opponents and criticize an election that he won suggest infighting among the elite thought to control Algeria.
“The reality is that this remains a more fragmented, less coherent political system than it ever has been or than people have ever assumed,” said Riccardo Fabiani, International Crisis Group’s North Africa director.
WHAT ARE THE STAKES?
Though Tebboune will likely emerge the winner, the election will reflect the depth of support for his political and economic policies five years after the pro-democracy movement toppled his predecessor.
Algeria is Africa’s largest country by area. With almost 45 million people, it’s the continent’s second most populous after South Africa to hold presidential elections in 2024 — a year in which more than 50 elections are being held worldwide, encompassing more than half the world’s population.
Thanks to oil and gas revenue, the country is relatively wealthy compared to its neighbors, yet large segments of the population have in recent years decried increases in the cost of living and routine shortages of staples including cooking oil and, in some regions, water.
The country is a linchpin to regional stability, often acting as a power broker and counterterrorism ally to western nations as neighboring countries — including Libya, Niger and Mali — are convulsed by violence, coups and revolution.
It’s a major energy supplier, especially to European countries trying to wean themselves off Russian gas and maintains deep, albeit contentious, ties with France, the colonial power that ruled it for more than a century until 1962.
The country spends twice as much on defense as any other in Africa and is the world’s third largest importer of Russian weapons after India and China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database.
Algeria election results are being questioned by the opposition candidates and the president himself
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Algeria election results are being questioned by the opposition candidates and the president himself
- Algeria is Africa’s largest country by area. With almost 45 million people, it’s the continent’s second most populous after South Africa to hold presidential elections in 2024
Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a haven for journalists during Lebanon’s civil war, shuts down
- The hotel, located in Beirut’s Hamra district, shut down over the weekend
- Officials have not commented on the decision
BEIRUT: During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut’s Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
