Democracy in the Maghreb
Where voting is a parlour game
Jun 6th 2002 | ALGIERS AND TUNIS
>From The Economist print edition
The democratic trappings in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco
A POLICEMAN taunts a young voter leaving a polling station in Bab El Oued, a seedy district of Algiers. "So, you got your visa?" In a country where jobs and housing are out of reach of most young people, getting a visa-that is, casting a pro-government ballot-may be their only hope of jumping the huge queue to a government salary or flat. Like its quieter neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, Algeria maintains plenty of democratic trappings. It has a feisty press. An alphabet soup of parties, including Islamist ones, has just contested parliamentary elections. Yet the outcome of the vote was never in doubt. Whether it is Tunisia's president-for-life, Morocco's powerful court clique, known as the Makhzen, or Algeria's shadowy Pouvoir, the Maghreb's ruling circles all indulge in democracy more as a parlour game than as a decision-making procedure. Some parts of the game are similar in all three countries. The nationalist card is a sure winner when it comes to blasting human-rights groups as foreign meddlers. The old tactic of brandishing the menace of fundamentalism to silence the middle classes has been newly popular since September 11th. But the rules vary widely. In prosperous little Tunisia, they are super strict, making for the dullest play. Except for a handful of lapdog leftist parties and a relentlessly harassed gaggle of human-rights groups, opposition, in effect, is outlawed. Last month, the president of the past 15 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, swept a referendum amending the constitution to allow him up to 12 more years in office, plus judicial impunity for life. Backed by a 130,000-strong police force, an adulatory state-controlled press, and a ruling party whose membership comprises a fifth of Tunisia's 10m population, he won a farcical 99.52% yes vote from a 99.56% turnout. Fun for Mr Ben Ali, but one dissident, writing to an Internet forum, describes the experience as "a nightmare where you scream but no sound comes out". The playing field is far flatter in Morocco, where King Mohammed VI has been genuinely popular since succeeding his tyrannical father in 1999. Here, the Socialist party that heads the coalition government was once in the opposition. A dozen other parties, including a mildly Islamist one, hold seats in parliament, and free elections are promised for September. Yet trade unionists, human-rights activists and harder-core Islamists all accuse the country's politicians of being too timid to take on the palace by tackling corruption or pressing for needed reforms. Criticising the king, the army or Morocco's claim to the disputed Western Sahara is still banned. Last month, a cleric in Fez earned a six-month jail sentence for his unacceptably fiery sermons. In Algeria, the same "crime" might have been paid for by sudden death, or by forced flight to join the Islamist guerrillas who still prowl the hills outside the capital. There are far fewer of these rebels since a 1999 amnesty. The monthly toll from massacres and army sweeps has fallen from thousands at the height of the civil war to fewer than 100 today. A semblanc e of normal life has returned. But that normality includes raging social ills, rampant corruption, a socialist-legacy economy that takes six weeks to cash a cheque, and poverty so stark that families spend two-thirds of their income on food. Since the May 30th elections, normality also includes a return to parliamentary majority for the FLN, the national liberation front that won Algeria's independence from France in 1962 and a subsequent quarter-century of one-party rule. The result was no surprise. The party that the FLN unseated was itself a recent creation of the Pouvoir, the narrow class of generals, apparatchiks and crony businessmen that is thought to run the country. A pair of "loyal" Islamist parties continue in the opposition.
Turn and turnabout The FLN's comeback may have been helped by a purge of old party stalwarts in favour of younger, more popular figureheads. Most Algerians, however, appear convinced that what it really reflects is the Pouvoir's struggle to reconsolidate its grip after the years of violence. Sustaining the illusion of alternation in office, in this view, is simply an attempt to palliate both the public and international opinion. By official count, some 54% of Algerians did not bother to vote, the lowest turnout in the country's history. Many responded to boycott calls from a range of opposition groups that included two of the leading secular parties. The loudest protest came from the Kabylia region east of the capital, a stronghold of the Berber minority who make up perhaps a third of Algeria's population. Here, the boycott was total. Since last spring, what began in Kabylia as a movement demanding ethnic Berber rights has snowballed into a mass insurrection that many Algerian analysts believe has national resonance. "It is not really about identity any more," says an Algiers businessman. "It is about justice, and this feeling is everywhere in Algeria." By his reading, Islamists are no longer the main threat to the Pouvoir: the real problem is their own ineptness. He predicts more repression, more violence, and perhaps, at the end, real democracy. Having wrestled with its Islamist demons, Algeria may be ripe for such a wrenching transition. Morocco could probably achieve the same result with less pain, and Tunisians, who mostly appear baffled by their government's repressiveness, are certainly ready for greater freedom. "We are more politically mature than our leaders," says a Tunisian exile, expressing a sense felt across the region. All three countries have embraced the idea of open markets, and have young populations that are better educated than their parents. Perhaps most important, the new generation holds a new kind of "visa". Radio, satellite television, the Internet and millions of relations overseas link them to other, more attractive, ways of doing things.
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