An independent deputy, Brahim Boughali, was elected president of Algeria's new national assembly, which officially took office on Thursday after the legislative elections of June 12 characterized by historic abstention.
Brahim Boughali, a fifty-year-old doctor, elected independent from the prefecture of Ghardaïa (south), gathered 295 votes.
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He was well ahead of an Islamist deputy from the Peace Society Movement (MSP), Ahmed Sadok, representative of the prefecture of Chlef (north-west), who received only 87 votes. The National People's Assembly, the lower house of parliament, has 407 deputies. Its president is the fourth person in the State, after the President of the Republic and the presidents of the Senate and of the Constitutional Council. The legislative elections of June 12 were won by the National Liberation Front (FLN, in power), with 98 seats, followed by independents rallied to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune (84), the MSP (65) and parties close to power.
“There are a lot of issues. The first is the rehabilitation of the legislative institution which has been mutilated because of old practices, ”
Zoheir Naceri, a young FLN deputy, who admitted that his party - associated with the autocratic rule of the FLN, told AFP. former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika - was responsible for the disinterest of the electorate. The vote of June 12 was marked by a record abstention (77%), in a country shaken by a serious political crisis since the popular uprising of Hirak started in 2019, against a background of generalized repression.
These elections were rejected by part of the opposition and the Hirak who demanded a radical change in
the
political
"system"
in place since independence in 1962. The new assembly is almost exclusively male since only 35 women were elected (out of 8,305 candidates), against 146 previously, due to the abolition of a quota system introduced in 2012 by Abdelaziz Bouteflika.