ALGERIA’S Islamist parties are joining forces ahead of April parliamentary elections in hope of reversing a long political decline and having a greater say in the future of the North African country.
But they face a firmly anti-Islamist government and an electorate with bitter memories of violence between militants and the state in the 1990s, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead.
The vote comes amid growing security and economic challenges along with speculation around who will succeed 79-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika — although experts say the real decision lies in the hands of the country’s secretive elite.
Three leading Islamist parties — El Binaa, the Front for Justice and Development (FJD) and Ennahda — said in December they were forming a “strategic” alliance for the election, ahead of a full merger later in 2017.
In early January, the Movement for the Society of Peace (MSP), which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a splinter group, the Front for Change, said they would reunite.
That could bring Algeria’s fragmented Islamist movement together into just two parties ahead of the April poll, the exact date for which has not yet been announced.
“They do not expect great successes in the next election, so they are trying to gather themselves and form a common force,” said political scientist Rachid Tlemcani.
Islamist parties in Algeria have realized that political Islam in its various forms has lost public support, he said.
Moderate Islamists have been forced to negotiate a difficult balancing act since the violence of the 1990s.
A radical movement, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), had been poised to win a parliamentary election in 1991 when the army stepped in to cancel it, prompting many FIS members to take up arms.
The “black decade” of violence that followed created divisions that last to this day.