Presidential candidates contest election results in Al…

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — The two opposition candidates running in Algeria’s presidential election filed a legal challenge to the preliminary results on Tuesday, while sharply criticizing election officials and disputing the vote count.

Islamist Abdellali Hassani Cherif and socialist Youcef Aouchiche filed an appeal with the Algerian Constitutional Court, taking the first step to challenge the result of the election won by incumbent President Abdelmadjid Tebboune with 94.7 percent of the vote.

Under Algerian law, the court has 10 days from the announcement of the provisional election results to rule on the appeals. A ruling could require the electoral authority to recalculate each candidate’s totals without calling into question Tebboune’s victory, for which he has already received congratulatory messages from Algeria’s foreign allies.

A day before filing their appeals, both candidates attacked Mohamed Charfi, president of Algeria’s National Independent Electoral Authority (ANIE), over the way the results of Saturday’s elections were reported.

“President Tebboune did not need this support. We knew he would be re-elected, but with these results, ANIE did him no favors,” Cherif said. “We want our votes – the votes of the people who voted for us – to be returned to us. I know it will not change the outcome of the election, but it will go down in history.”

Meanwhile, Aouchiche held a press conference at which his campaign manager showed graphics that he said proved the results had been falsified. He called the outcome a “shameful and gross manipulation.”

“These results, which do not correspond at all to the number of votes communicated to us by the ANIE regional delegations, are a disgrace for Algeria in 2024 and take us back to the 1970s,” he said, referring to a time when the country’s only legal political party fielded its elected candidate unopposed.

The two challengers complained of discrepancies between the number of votes used to calculate the results and the turnout figures that election officials released a day earlier. Late Sunday, Tebboune joined their critics against ANIE, joining the general anger that his challengers have stoked against the party.

In a joint statement, campaign managers for Tebboune, Aouchiche and Cherif questioned the results reported by ANIE, noting that they did not match the regional figures reported by local authorities.

“We inform the national public that inaccuracies, contradictions, ambiguities and discrepancies in the figures were found during the announcement of the provisional results of the presidential elections by the Chairman of the National Independent Electoral Authority,” they wrote.

For Algeria, this unprecedented turn of events represents a turning point, as elections there have always been carefully orchestrated affairs by the ruling elite and the military apparatus that supports them.

The electoral authority ANIE was created in 2019 in response to demands from the pro-democracy protests whose weekly demonstrations rocked Algeria. The independent body replaced the Algerian Ministry of the Interior and was supposed to ensure the integrity and transparency of the elections.

But her independence has been questioned, particularly after it was reported on Saturday that Tebboune won Russia’s presidential election in March with a larger share of the vote than Vladimir Putin.

In the local media, commentators speculated that Tebboune’s decision to criticise the electoral authority after the winner was announced was indicative of a “clan war” within the shady ruling elite that supposedly runs Algeria. Charfi, the top electoral official, was denounced in the regional daily The Republican East for acting as a “troublemaker” and “discrediting the election”.

Five years after the pro-democracy “Hirak” movement overthrew Tebboune’s predecessor, recent developments have shown many Algerians how little has changed. Although the Hirak called for a boycott of the election, its criticism of the system was clearly audible after the election results, said former communications minister Abdelaziz Rahabi.

“What I feared and denounced has happened. The country has become ungovernable because it has not fulfilled the Hirak’s most important demands and politics and the media have closed down,” he wrote on X.