The Algerian Hirak
Algerians filled the streets every Friday for a year in 2019 and removed a president who had not been seen in public for six years. Abdelaziz Bouteflika had been in power since 1999 and had suffered a stroke in 2013 that left him in a wheelchair and barely able to speak. He appeared at official occasions rarely and had been re-elected in 2014 without campaigning. In February 2019 the ruling party announced that he would stand for a fifth term, and in some cases his portrait was sent to ceremonies in his place. The protests began on 22 February and were immediately unlike anything since independence: millions of people in every city, entirely peaceful, deliberately leaderless, cleaning the streets afterwards, and pointedly avoiding any slogan that could be read as sectarian or Islamist. The memory of the civil war of the 1990s, which killed some 200,000 people, was the reason for all of it. The army chief withdrew support and Bouteflika resigned on 2 April. The movement did not stop, because its demand was not one man but the whole structure — le pouvoir, meaning the army, the security services and the business networks behind the presidency. Dozens of senior officials and businessmen were prosecuted for corruption, and a presidential election in December 2019 was held on a turnout of under forty per cent and produced a former prime minister. The pandemic ended the marches in March 2020. The movement's discipline is what distinguished it and is also what limited it. It refused leaders, negotiations and a transitional structure on the grounds that all three had been captured before, and so had nothing to put in place of the system it had shaken.
- Year: 2019 CE
- Category: Political
