By Arezki Daoud – 26 March 2019: Army chief Ahmed Gaid Salah made a stunning recommendation today (March 26) when he said impeaching the president may be the best option left to keep the country stable. His statement came a day after several operatives of the current political system, in particular senior officials of the ruling FLN and RND parties rejected President Bouteflika’s transition roadmap, in what appears to be an organized strategy to impose a solution from within the incredibly impopular regime.
Among those lining up for a regime-driven solution is the RND chief, the highly disliked former Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, as well as RND and FLN spokesmen calling for “the will of the people to be implemented.” These calls have been greeted by opposition figures as a way to maintain the regime, if article 102 of the Algerian Constitution is used to impeach Bouteflika on the ground that he can no longer govern.
Former leaders of the opposition party FFS, Djamel Zenat said the General’s call “is part of a conspiracy to allow the system to regenerate itself.” He added that the idea here is “to sacrifice Bouteflika to save everybody else.” Sofiane Djillali, the head of opposition group Jil Jadid, also criticized Gaid Salah’s announcement, reiterating the need to respond to the street’s call for a wholesale change of the regime and not to follow continuity steps that will keep the system intact. Opposition figure and former Prime Minister Ali Benflis said “given the exceptional situation in our country, the implementation of Article 102 of the Constitution is not likely to be the only basis for the resolution of the crisis. From this point of view, the application of Article 102 must imperatively be adapted so that the conditions of transparency, regularity and integrity that the people demand so that they can freely express their choice without constraint or guardianship must be respected.” NGOs and associations are also concerned about the turn of event. Abdelwahab Fersaoui, the head of youth group RAJ called the idea a “Machiavellic maneuver with the regime seeking to maintain itself.”
At the center of this rejection of the General’s idea is the fact that a post-impeachment period will be managed by officials who have been placed by the Bouteflika regime. They are unpopular and indeed part of the problem. Among them is the head of the Constitutional Council, Tayeb Belaiz, a super-loyalist of Bouteflika who was appointed by the latter on 10 February 2019, ironically just days before the crisis erupted. Appointed for a single term of eight years, the president of the Constitutional Council will still be there when organizing presidential elections, unless he resigns. It is he who will receive the candidates’ applications and he who will validate them or reject them. A Constitutional Council presided over by Belaiz will clearly be a hindrance to the holding of credible and fair presidential elections.
Article 104 of the Constitution provides that in the event of the President being incapacitated, the government already in place will remain operational and will continue in its mission until the election of a new President. But article 104 addresses only the need for transition in normal circumstances. For example, a normal president who suddenly fell ill and governance is left for a normal government cabinet. But nothing is normal in Algeria today, and the public call for change does not just focus on the president, but on the entire system put in place to maintain status quo.
The General’s scenario consists of organizing the presidential election after a period of four and a half months during which the presidency would be held by yet another regime insider, Abdelkader Bensalah, president of the rubber-stampting parliament’s high chamber known as the Nation’s Council. The idea of Bensalah taking over the presidency for that period is not well accepted in the mass movement and in the opposition.
