It has now been nine years since protests broke out across the Middle East and North Africa. After citizens took to the streets, the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen all were deposed during the Arab Spring. What about Algeria – the tenth-largest country in the world, the largest in Africa and a country…
Let us now praise famous men. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, for example. What goes on in his comatose brain? What moves in the 82-year old heart of the zombie president who – as the Algerians protesting his fifth attempt at presidential power have just discovered – will now stay on as a coffin-leader into next year. Or, who knows, the…
The ongoing protests against the sitting president Abdelaziz Bouteflika that remained at the helm of Algerian politics for two decades and was going to run for the office for the fifth time have led to an abrupt deterioration in the political situation in this country. As a matter of fact, the Bouteflika government has been…
We have all been here before, several times. We were here when Islamists won the first round of elections in Algeria in December 1991; when an uprising in Yemen started on 27 January, 2011; when Hosni Mubarak stepped down after 18 days of demonstrations in Egypt on 11 February; when the protests in the town…
The announcement that Algerian President Bouteflika won’t run for re-election but will instead postpone the upcoming vote until the conclusion of his recently decreed comprehensive constitutional reform process represented the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years, making one wonder whether the world has been ignoring an almost decade-long “African Spring” or…
Algeria is experiencing political unrest after its ailing leader decided to run for his fifth term next month. The North African state has been rocked by its largest protests since the 2011 “Arab Spring” after President Bouteflika – who’s thought by many to be physically, and possibly even mentally, incapacitated after suffering a debilitating stroke…
