‘Missing’ leader sparks deja vu in Algeria

Bloomberg

Algeria’s 75-year-old leader flew to Germany last month for treatment after catching Covid-19. He hasn’t been seen in public since and barely a word on his condition reaches home.
The prolonged absence of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is now the hot topic of political debate, supplanting a vote on constitutional reform and the rumblings of war near the country’s western border. But it’s also stirring uncomfortable echoes of veteran predecessor Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who spent months in the hospital abroad before his bid for re-election sparked mass unrest and his downfall last year.
Algerians are again in limbo as the protest-wracked country faces its biggest economic challenge in decades, plotting a
recovery from the pandemic and a fall in income from energy exports. The latest update on the president’s condition came on November 15, when his office said he’d completed treatment and was undergoing tests. Yet there have been no indications of a return to work for the president, even with a revised constitution and 2021 budget awaiting his sign-off.
Clashes between neighbouring Morocco and Polisario, a group advocating Western Saharan independence, threaten to spiral into all-out conflict in the disputed territory.
Social media and even the pages of the nation’s tightly controlled press reflect growing concern. On Facebook, a mock-up of a missing-persons poster appeals for news on an elderly gentleman last seen in mid-October — Tebboune’s most recent public appearance.
A cartoon in Liberte, a popular tabloid, showed an empty picture frame without its presidential portrait perched on a long red carpet. The implication was clear: Tebboune’s missing in action.
“Why is the truth about Tebboune’s health being kept from us?” said Nabil, 31, who works in finance in the capital, Algiers. “Why don’t they show us pictures of him in hospital?”
Things were fraught enough before Tebboune was infected. Installed in an election boycotted by the majority of the nation’s 44 million people, the long-time government insider inherited an economy bedeviled by low oil prices and a current-account deficit that’s shaping up to be worse than that in debt-defaulting Lebanon.
Authorities promoted November 1 referendum on the constitution as addressing demands of a leaderless, peaceful protest movement calling for the removal of the “pouvoir” — a military, government and business elite that’s ruled since independence from France in the 1960s.