Islamists Win Some Say in Governing Algeria

ALGIERS, Algeria — Pro-government forces Friday took the largest share of Algeria’s first multi-party parliament amid charges of fraud and irregularity.

But two Islamist parties also gained one-fourth of the seats, giving a society racked by violence a new breath of political pluralism.

“This is a big democratic day, . . . a great day,” declared one ebullient leader of the moderate Islamists, Mahfoud Nahnah, even as he launched into a tirade about votes allegedly stolen from his party.

All in all, the Thursday election was a mixed bag, political analysts and election observers said.

The 65% turnout was unimpressive by Algerian standards. Favoritism toward the pro-government camp almost certainly occurred, and parliament itself will enjoy only limited powers with the army and President Liamine Zeroual still firmly in control.

Yet the results gave Islamists and other government critics a voice in governing, an attainment that could blunt the appeal of violent groups that have waged a five-year war of terror against Algerian authorities after Islamists were stopped from taking power when the army canceled the country’s first democratic election in 1992.

The distribution of seats was realistic enough to be accepted by a war-weary public, even if “you have to hold your nose a bit,” predicted one international monitor with long experience in the country.

The voting was carried out in a war atmosphere. The overriding question was whether, in the long run, it would serve the interests of peace.

Zeroual’s government lost no time claiming that it will.

“This historic vote, which was not marred by any distortion, is an enormous progress and a great victory,” an enthusiastic Interior Minister Mustafa Benmansour told journalists.

Zeroual’s 2-month-old National Democratic Rally won 155 seats, or 41% of the 380 places. Known by its French acronym RND, the party was backed by the country’s sizable administrative bureaucracy and military, and it picked up votes from Algerians supportive of Zeroual’s policy of eradicating “terrorism” while cautiously introducing market reforms.

Opposition parties said vote manipulation was a major factor in the RND’s success, and some foreign election observers were inclined to agree.

Although the monitors in the country have not yet issued their final reports, they said privately that there were at least strong grounds to suspect the size of the RND’s victory margin.

One observer said he saw ballot boxes from army posts where turnout was reported at 100% and all the votes were for the RND. In addition, he said, the ballots had been folded uniformly and stacked perfectly inside the box.

In second place was Nahnah’s Movement for a Peaceful Society, a moderate Islamic party. It won 69 seats, or 18% of the total. Another relatively moderate, Islamic-oriented party, Nanda, won 34 seats, giving Islamists control of 103 seats, or 27% of the parliament.

The moderate Islamists charged that the final tally was rigged against them but indicated that they will take their seats in parliament anyway.

Nahnah said he will press for greater dialogue, an apparent reference to the banning of the Islamic Salvation Front, which would have won in 1992 and whose leaders remain in prison.

“To stop the bloodshed, you need dialogue and agreement and efficient discussions among all the political classes,” he said.

Although the Islamist parties turned in a respectable showing, other opposition parties were far more disappointed and strident in their complaints of vote fraud.

“The authority is carrying out these practices to ensure its longevity, even to the detriment of the country,” said Said Saadi, head of the Rally for Culture and Democracy, a party opposed to Islamic militants, which had been expected to do better than the 19 seats it obtained.

Charges of irregularities centered on two categories: “special voting”--the voting of soldiers, police, firefighters and other state workers who voted separately because of public duties--and “itinerant voting”--in which ballot boxes were moved among sparsely settled areas.

Opposition parties said in both cases they could not properly monitor the ballot boxes. In some rural areas, poll watchers from various parties complained of being driven away from voting stations, even at gunpoint, and of ballot boxes being opened or removed for long periods.

What was unclear was whether the level of fraud was so egregious that it would lead to a popular outburst or renewed support for armed groups that oppose the government.

University of Algiers political scientist Mohammed Henna said he believes that the election could be a step toward the end of violence, as long as the parliament has a semblance of pluralism.

“If these elections give confidence to the people that things are moving in the right direction, I think that the phenomenon of violence will decrease in a fairly short time,” he predicted.

The official turnout was higher than the first round of the parliamentary elections aborted in 1992, when the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win. However, it fell far short of the voter participation in 1995’s presidential election and in a referendum last November to amend the constitution.

Opposition parties said they believe that even the 65% figure was cooked up by authorities eager to portray the election as a success.

Henna said he believes that the relatively low turnout had to do with a lack of confidence in the government rather than with calls by Islamist groups to boycott.

But the fact that millions of people did choose to participate despite the country’s dire situation and five years of violence should not be dismissed lightly, he said: “They want to solve the crisis.”

Henna said elections should not have been held until the violence in the country has been resolved. Nevertheless, he saw one positive sign in the vote: “Everyone in Algeria now is convinced that you cannot get power without going through the ballot box, and elections should be genuinely pluralistic.”