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
Israeli court ordered prisons to give Palestinian detainees more food
- At least 101 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since the start of the Gaza war
NABLUS: Five months after Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that its prisons were failing to provide enough food for Palestinian detainees and ordered conditions be improved, emaciated prisoners are still emerging with tales of extreme hunger and abuse.
Samer Khawaireh, 45, told Reuters that all he was given to eat in Israel’s Megiddo and Nafha prisons was ten thin pieces of bread over the course of a day, with a bit of hummus and tahini. Twice a week some tuna.
Videos saved on Khawaireh’s phone show him at normal weight before he was detained in the West Bank city of Nablus last April, and clearly emaciated upon his release. He says he lost 22 kg (49 pounds) during nine months in captivity, emerging a month ago covered in scabies sores and so gaunt and dishevelled his 9-year-old son Azadeen didn’t recognize him.
Reuters could not independently determine the total number of prisons where the scarcity of food prevailed, or the total number of inmates who experienced its toll.
Reuters could not independently verify Khawaireh’s diet during his captivity, the reasons for his extreme weight loss, or exactly how widespread such experience is among the 9,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
But it was consistent with descriptions in some reports compiled by lawyers after prison visits. Reuters reviewed 13 such reports from December and January, in which 27 prisoners complained of a lack of food, with most saying provisions had not changed since the court order.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which was involved in last year’s landmark court case that led to the order for better treatment for prisoners, has accused the government of harboring a “policy of starvation” in prisons.
The Israel Prisons Service declined to comment on Khawaireh’s individual case but said it “rejects allegations of ‘starvation’ or systematic neglect. Nutrition and medical care are provided based on professional standards and operational procedures.”
The service “operates in accordance with the law and court rulings” and all complaints are investigated through official channels, a spokesperson said.
“Basic rights, including access to food, medical care, and adequate living conditions, are provided in accordance with the law and applicable procedures, by professionally trained staff.”
Khawaireh, a journalist at a Nablus radio station who was held without charge, said he was never told why he was detained in a night raid on his house in April. Israel’s military declined to comment.
RIGHTS GROUP ASKS COURT TO HOLD PRISON SERVICE IN CONTEMPT
Independent verification of the treatment of detainees has become more difficult since the start of the Gaza War, when Israel barred prison visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, a role the Geneva-based body has played in conflicts around the world for a century.
ACRI has petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to allow Red Cross access to Palestinian detainees. It has also applied to court to have the prison service held in contempt for failing to comply with last September’s order that it improve conditions.
“All the indications that we’re getting are that not much has changed” since the court ruling, the group’s executive director Noa Sattath told Reuters.
“The prisoners are not getting more food if they ask for it. There hasn’t been any medical examination of the situation of the prisoners, and the prisoners are still hungry.”
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment on the case.
BENEFITS AND INDULGENCES
The number of detainees held by Israel swelled after the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, with thousands swept up during Israel’s assault on Gaza and a crackdown in the occupied West Bank, though hundreds were freed under a ceasefire last October.
Throughout the war in Gaza, Israel’s Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of the prisons service, has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with the abuse faced by Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, many of whom were released in a state of near starvation that shocked Israelis.
Hamas denies starving hostages, saying they ate as well as their captors under Israeli restrictions on supplies to Gaza.
Sattath, of ACRI, said the treatment of hostages held by militants provides no justification for mistreating Palestinian detainees.
After returning to office atop the most right-wing government in Israel’s history in late 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put prisons in the hands of Ben-Gvir, a far-right settler activist known for keeping a portrait in his living room of a Jewish gunman who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in a West Bank mosque.
Among Ben-Gvir’s first acts in office was to shut prison bakeries where Palestinian detainees had been allowed to make their own food, saying he aimed to cancel “benefits and indulgences.”
He has since publicly denounced courts for trying to force prisons to coddle Israel’s enemies. During last year’s court hearings, he called the case “crazy and delusional” in a post on X, mocked the judges for debating “whether the killers’ menu is balanced,” and said he was “here to make sure the terrorists get the bare minimum.”
Ben-Gvir did not respond to a request for comment, including on whether the prison service is now in compliance with the court’s ruling, or whether any policies have been changed in response to it.
ACRI says the far-right’s criticism of judges amounts to a smear campaign intended to intimidate the judiciary. In 2024 the Supreme Court took the unusual step of complaining publicly over posters put up by right-wing activists, denouncing judges.
Hunger, more widely, has been an issue in the war in Gaza, where the United Nations says Israeli supply restrictions caused malnutrition among the more than 2 million Palestinian residents, reaching famine scale in mid-2025. Israel says the extent of hunger was exaggerated and blames Hamas fighters for stealing aid. Hamas denies diverting food, and a US analysis found no evidence that the militants did so systematically.
LAWYERS SAY TEEN DIED IN CUSTODY OF MALNUTRITION
At least 101 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since the start of the Gaza war, according to the rights group Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).
Among them was Walid Ahmed, 17, who died in March last year after collapsing and hitting his head in prison, which his lawyers say was a result of illness due to malnutrition.
“His autopsy showed massive weight loss — loss of muscle mass, fat, weakened immune system. When he got an infection, his body couldn’t fight it,” said Ahmed’s lawyer Nadia Daqqa.
Ahmed’s autopsy, reviewed by Reuters, said he suffered from “prolonged malnutrition” and listed starvation, infection and dehydration as potential causes of death.
The prison service declined to comment on Ahmed’s treatment in custody or the cause of his death.
Naji Abbas, PHRI’s director of the prisoners and detainees department, says chronic hunger has made the overall detainee population dangerously susceptible to other ailments.
“When people are being starved, their immune system is weak. So every medical problem, even the simplest one, can become serious,” he said.
Amani Sarahneh, the director of media and documentation for the Palestinian Prisoners Society, who has reviewed hundreds of cases and is in continuous contact with detainees, said the physical consequences are only part of the impact of hunger.
“When you hear detainees describe food, you see how huge a space it takes in their minds, because the human desire to feel full is so basic. Israel uses this heavily: not only physically but psychologically,” she said.
Khawaireh, who has returned to work since his release on January 7, has put weight back on, though he still looks thin.
While in prison, he said he and other detainees sometimes would save up half their allotment of bread for Saturday, so that once a week they can feel full.
“We want to feel, one day, that we are full — even once a week, we want to feel full, we are never full.”
