Protesters have rejected an offer by Algeria’s president to serve a truncated term in office if re-elected next month, taking to the streets overnight to amplify their calls for him to leave office.
In an effort to calm public anger after more than a week of demonstrations, Abdelaziz Bouteflika said in a written message late on Sunday that if he was elected to a fifth term, he would call a national conference to set a date for another poll in which he would not be a candidate.
But thousands of demonstrators denounced the proposal as they gathered overnight in the centre of the capital Algiers and in other cities.
Zahira, a student who joined the protests, said she was not taken in by Mr Bouteflika’s offer. “He’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Bouteflika is not the man to lead a democratic transition. These promises are just a way to gain time. I’m sure if he is elected, he’ll stay for the entire term,” she said.
Mahmoud Kerral, a teacher, pointed out that Algeria’s authorities had a long record of promising to liberalise the system before clamping down. “Algeria is not a democratic country and it won’t become one under Bouteflika and his clique,” he said.
The protests, which began 10 days ago in the capital Algiers, have turned into an unprecedented expression of anger against the effort to extend Mr Bouteflika’s rule.
The president, who turned 82 on Saturday, has been paralysed since he suffered a stroke in 2013. He has rarely been seen in public since then and has not been heard speaking by his people in six years.
The offer to shorten the next presidential term, which was coupled with an ambiguous allusion to constitutional reform, was dismissed by many Algerians as a ploy to prolong the life of the secretive regime.
Makhlouf Mehenni, a commentator on the TSA Algerie news website, described the reference to a national conference as vague, writing that “concession is too big a word for Mr Bouteflika’s proposal”. “To see in it yet another manoeuvre is neither an exaggeration nor is it paranoid,” he added. “The message from the president lacks a very important detail: the date of the envisioned [early] election.”
Mr Bouteflika’s campaign manager presented the president’s formal nomination papers late on Sunday, but there was no sign of the elderly leader who is reported to be in a hospital in Geneva undergoing medical checks.
“I have heard the pleas of protesters and especially thousands of young people who asked about our nation’s future,” he wrote in his message.
Many Algerians consider Mr Bouteflika’s candidacy an insult and suspect that real decision-making lies in the hands of an opaque clique of power brokers around him, including military leaders and his brother Said Bouteflika.
On Sunday — the deadline for candidates to submit their documents for the presidential election — thousands of people protested across Algeria.
Protests also took place on Friday when hundreds of thousands took to the streets of cities throughout the country. There was a sense of exhilaration as families marched together and demonstrators took pride in their defiance. Police have largely stood by and allowed the peaceful protests to proceed.
Many Algerians credit Mr Bouteflika, who became president in 1999, with restoring peace to the country after a decade of conflict between radical Islamists and the state, which killed about 200,000 people.
Opponents, however, say the system has been stagnating for years, corruption is rife and there is no accountability, while the difficult task of transforming an economy dependent on hydrocarbon exports to create jobs for a young population has not even started.
