Algeria is strangely quiet—at least for now

By J. Dana Stuster

Best Defense office of Arab seasonal affairs 

In the earliest days of the Arab Spring, Algeria appeared
poised to join Tunisia in its revolution. Protests swept through the country
weeks before the first stirrings in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya or Syria. According
to The Economist's tongue-in-cheek attempt to quantify the factors
generating the unrest ("the shoe thrower's index"), Algeria seemed less likely to
be stable than its revolutionary neighbor and far outpaced Bahrain in factors
contributing to potential unrest.

Algeria isn't stable now, but it has managed to avoid
reaching a critical mass of domestic upheaval through a measured police
response that has been severe without being so brutal that it incites more
anger, as well as economic concessions that reduced the cost of staple foods
and legal reforms that include the repeal the country's twenty-year-old
emergency law. While it remains to be seen whether these concessions will stick
in the long-term, they seem to have bought some time for the Algerian
government.

The next potential crisis will be the country's legislative
elections, scheduled for May. The country is only dubiously democratic; true
power resides with a cabal of political and military officials informally know
as Le Pouvoir, and there are concerns that, if a truly democratic election
is held, the military may intervene to prevent an Islamist landslide in the
parliament. The last time the military stepped in was 1992; what followed was a
military coup, the institution of the emergency law, and an ugly civil war. The
Algerian government is only now walking back the many effects of 1992, and if Le
Pouvoir intervenes in May it would be a significant setback for the
country, but so too could be a polarizing election.

Speaking at CSIS recently, Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad
Medelci expressed his full confidence that the military will support the
results of the election and downplayed the significance of a potential Islamist
election, pointing out that an Islamist party (condoned by the government) has
participated in the parliament since the late 1990s. Listening to Medelci, it
is easy to get caught up in his optimism for Algeria. He boasts about his
country's progress toward meeting the United Nations' Development Program's
Millennium Development Goals and speaks eloquently about the political and
economic reforms underway. Speaking to a collection of Arab media,
businesspeople, think tank experts, and diplomats, he touted the increasing
privatization of the economy, the large college-educated population (the
majority of which are women), the proliferation of trade agreements, and the
government's attempts to diversify the economy, including a large solar array
to reduce Algeria's reliance on oil exports. He tied the new flurry of reforms
to Algeria's efforts over the past decade to better incorporate minority
groups, though he didn't go into detail on these. He seemed pleased with the
new reforms, which include expanded press freedoms, a new quota system for
women's representation in the parliament, an increased role for the judiciary
in elections to make them more independent from the administration, and an
upcoming revision of the constitution.

It all sounds very promising, and if done right, it could be
precisely the sort of gradual reform that the United States has encouraged the
monarchies in the Gulf to embrace. But even ignoring the questions about how
healthy Algeria's economy truly is (only last year, Issandr El Amrani called Bouteflika's economic policy "an unmitigated
disaster"), Algeria has only a of opportunity for this to succeed -
Bouteflika's term expires in 2014, but he is physically ailing and there is no
clear means of succession if he passes while in office. If Algeria cannot
prepare its democratic institutions for this essential transition, it will face
a two-front struggle: a crisis within Le Pouvoir, and also the
remobilization of the disenfranchised and disheartened public that took to the
streets in January 2011. Eurasia Group's James Fallon pointed to Algeria for a potential renewal of upheaval last
November, and while the protesters in Algiers had difficulty expressing a set of common grievances, they will
no doubt learn from the successes in Egypt and Tunisia.

While Algeria's problems are far from solved and new unrest
may arise between now and then, for now, its role in the Arab Spring is
restricted to its participation in the Arab League delegation to Syria. Medelci
distanced his government from Anwar Malek, the Algerian monitor who resigned from the
delegation and called it a "farce." Medelci has pointed out that Malek was
representing a non-governmental organization and not the Algerian government,
which remains committed to the mission in Syria. Justifying this commitment
involved some verbal hurdles. Pressed by Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center to
reconcile Algeria's involvement in the Arab League's involvement in Syria with
its policy of non-intervention, Medelci explained that he considers the Arab
League mission as less a matter of interference, but an effort to prevent broader interference through providing an option for
third-party mediation.

Medelci was nothing if not positive in his
assessment. Speaking of its revolutionary neighbors in North Africa, he told
the audience, "We hope that these countries now control their destiny and can
join us as stronger partners. We need stronger partners, but we are not in a
position to be hegemonic. We don't have lessons to teach but we share a
revolutionary heritage." This July will mark the fiftieth anniversary of
Algeria's independence from France, and while, for now, Algeria's
non-interventionist intervention in Syria may be the center of attention, it is
shaping up to be a dramatic year domestically as well. Here's hoping it lives
up to the foreign minister's optimism.