Algeria's congressional elections will take place on Thursday May 17. Approximately 19 million Algerians will go to the polls to choose 389 representatives of the National People's assembly. It will be the third such election since 1991, when a first-round victory by the Islamic Salvation Front, a coalition of Islamic parties, led to a reaction by the country's generals, who nullified the results and arrested ISF leaders. The repression unleashed a bloody civil war that cost 200,000 lives in ten years, most of them civilians.

Predictable Results. Today's Algeria is very different, but the April 11 bombings that killed thirty people brought back the specter of Islamic terrorism and made it a main theme of a subdued election campaign, along with corruption and economic development. The campaign has been marked by low voter interest, with numerous rallies cancelled due to low turnout. International observers are concerned about the lack of participation, due to the certain victory of the National Liberation Front, the party that guided the nation to independence from France in the 1960s and now leads a coalition with the Islamic moderates of the Movement for Social Peace and the liberals of the National Democracy Party. Other important parties among many smaller ones include the leftist Workers Party of Louiza Hanoune, and the Culture and Democracy Party under Said Sadi, which represents the Berber minority based in the Cabilia region. Sadi gave voice to the low expectations when he agreed to participate this time around, after boycotting the 2002 elections, but said, "This election will have the same fraud as always. But this time we have to participate in order to speak our piece." Echoing Sadi, the Cabilia-based Socialist Front has decided instead to boycott this election, and former Islamist leaders of the ISF and El Islah have also called for a boycott.

Boutef's Sense of Power. Why so much disillusionment? For good or ill, the cause is Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 70, FLN chief since 1999, and re-elected president in 2004. Known as Boutef by his countrymen, he has been the center of gravity of Algerian politics for the past decade. With the Law of National Reconciliation of 1999 and the Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation approved by referendum in March 1, 2006, he officially closed the books on the civil war's massacres. In truth, the massacres are not forgotten, and the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism has never really ended, although his measures have restored to the civilian population a sense of security lost since the dark years, by confining violence to the mountainous regions in the less-populated areas. Boutef's poor health, which came to light during a hospital stay in Paris in 2006, has forced him to reduce public appearances to a minimum, leading to speculation about who will eventually replace him.. During rare public appearances in recent days, Boutef denied reports of ill health, vigorously renewed his declaration of war against the last remnants of the armed resistance, and announced a plan to lead the nation's economy from the state control of the 90s toward the free market.

The Color of Money. The economy is the flower in Boutef's lapel. According to the monitoring organization Mediterranean Investment Project Observancy, Algeria has tripled direct investment from abroad in the past year, reaching a figure of 2.2 million euros. Foreign firms see great potential in the Algerian economy, boosted by the government's recent reforms. The International Monetary Fund recorded that in 2006 Algeria raised its GNP, increased currency holdings and reduced unemployment, foreign debt, and inflation. Privatizing formerly public industries has brought positive effects, and plans to privatize national giants in petroleum, natural gas, rail, and telecommunications have international investors' mouths watering. Most important is the reduction in foreign debt, down from 34 to 4% of GNP in recent years. In 2004 alone the government paid off 10 million euros in debt and cancelled a 3.5 billion euro debt to Russia in exchange for access to natural resources. This has come about thanks to a much more transparent and rational management of income from the sale of oil and natural gas, whose proceeds have been invested in education, infrastructure, and public health. Boutef has shown great skill in "the resource war," balancing commitments with independence. The 5-year economic development plan will be supported by 60 billion dollars from the US, and Algiers and Washington are collaborating on a nuclear energy program. At the same time Boutef is working with Russia in a cartel of natural gas producers. Finally, he has contracted with China to build a superhighway along the Mediterranean coast. Thanks to these efforts, Algeria is only a step away from entering the World Trade Organization, a sign that the international community is convinced of Algeria's political and economic stability, even though it remains overly dependent on its energy resources. A return of terrorism could put this achievement at risk, especially threatening tourism, which has not yet taken off as it has in neighboring Morocco. The April 11 bombings sounded as a threatening note for Boutef and Algeria's bright future.

The Return of Violence. The civil war never really ended, but the government was able to isolate the remaining core of the resistance, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). Born in 1998 from a rib of the Armed Islamic Group, the Salafist Group never accepted the defeat of the Salvation Front and remains hostile, although it declared its intention to strike only military, not civilian targets. But something changed at the end of 2006. A nightmare of half the world's security forces became reality when al-Qaeda's second in command, al-Zawahiri, blessed the entrance of the Algerian fighters into Bin Laden's organization. Shortly thereafter, a former GSPC leader, Hassan Hattab, announced his readiness to negotiate with the government, but by then he had already been replaced by Abou Moussab Abdelwadoud, alias Abdelmalek Droukel, a bloody veteran of the civil wars.

Abdelwadoud brought a turning point: in December 2006 employees of a US company working in Algeria were attacked, marking the beginning of a new strategy of attacks on civilians and international interests. The Salafist Group is aiming at regional control, changing its name to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. Tunisia, Morocco, and Mali are being drawn into the conflict, becoming targets for attacks, threatened and carried out, such as the April 11 bombings. The danger of Algeria falling back into the spiral of violence could scare foreign investors, destroying the achievement of Boutef and his followers. The government has mobilized more than 10,000 Special Forces troops to fight al-Qaeda in a massive and ruthless anti-terrorism operation.

Rights in the Dark. Boutef's detractors, meanwhile, charge that all this is simply yet another virtuoso maneuver. The opposition parties have long accused Boutef of manipulating fear of terrorism to mobilize public support. As proof, they cite the Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation, which freed nearly 3,000 former militants from the civil war era. A new referendum scheduled for 2007 calls for a constitutional reform that sources say would greatly expand the president's powers, giving him a 7-year mandate rather than the current one of 5 years, and allowing him to run for a third term at the end of his second in 2009. What better way to provoke Algerians to reform their Constitution than the fear of losing Boutef? His opponents further point to the president's close ties to Washington and his support for Plan Sahel, a program for a massive increase in the US military presence in Africa, with the declared intention of fighting al-Qaeda. The Algerian government claims that the Cabilia region, home of the minority Berbers, is also the source of the armed resistance. A revolt there several years ago was bloodily quashed on orders of Boutef. He's thus killing two birds with one stone, say detractors. Boutef's hostility to any form of opposition remains a thorny issue. Reporters Sans Frontieres, which promotes freedom of the press worldwide, praises the president for the amnesty granted last July to journalists jailed for "defamation of authority," but condemns his government for arrests of reporters on charges of "offences against Islam" and "denigration of the international image of Algeria and the National Reconciliation Agreement." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also have the Agreement in their sights, accusing Boutef's government of torture and a whitewash of crimes committed during the civil war both by Islamists and government forces. The May 17 elections will be a sort of plebiscite on Boutef and on the lights and shadows of his power.