Party infighting could derail the FLN in Algeria

Algeria

Published on Monday, 16 January 2017 Back to articles

Whether Algeria’s FLN (National Liberation Front) gets to the April 2017 elections as a united, well-managed and organised party is highly debatable. Many thought that Djamel Ould Abbes — Amar Saâdani’s successor as the party’s secretary-general — was not strong enough to both clean-up and reunite the party. The jury is still out. But the next few weeks should prove decisive one way or another.

After a two-and-half-month phony war between Ould Abbes and Saâdani’s ‘old guard’, the gloves came off on 9 January with the resignation of the FLN’s head of communications Hocine Khaldoune (a.k.a. Khaldoun), who is a member of the FLN party’s political bureau. The former telecoms minister, Moussa Benhamadi, has replaced him as head of communications and information advisor.

Khaldoune exclaimed that he resigned because of Djamel Ould Abbes ‘individualistic’ and ‘irresponsible’ behavior. He has openly accused Ould Abbes of ‘sowing trouble’ within the FLN party, saying on his Facebook page that he was unable to continue working with the secretary general because he no longer consulted the members of the political bureau nor informed them of his decisions.

Khaldoune says he will not ‘go home’ and that he will fight to the end ‘to safeguard the FLN, which represents the blood of our martyrs and our moudjahidines’. He has launched an appeal to the party’s activists to mobilise and evict Ould Abbes, whom he considers ‘unconscious’ of the responsibility that falls to the FLN.

Ould Abbes took over a highly corrupt and fragmented party which – thanks to Saâdani’s stewardship – many of its members saw as a vehicle for their own political, business and material advancement, usually by highly corrupt means. With Ould Abbes setting out to rid the party of this corruption, it was only a matter of time before Saâdani’s supporters, along with some other marginalised factions, made their stand. Ould Abbes’ methods have been to exert strict discipline, and appoint new structures and commissions that enabled him to bypass the political bureau that was mostly filled by Saâdani’s placemen. He has also tried to inject into the party’s central framework the many former ministers and party leaders who had been marginalised by both Saâdani and his predecessor Abdelaziz Belkhadem.

With the gloves now off and with several Mohafedhs already dismissed, the preparation of the election candidate list promises to be explosive, if Ould Abbes can survive that long.

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