Algeria Politics

The Prime Minister of Algeria, Noureddine Bedoui, is set to resign to pave way for the country’s elections. This comes after the country’s army chief insisted that the country should hold elections latest in December this year. General Ahmed Gaid Salah said that the election, which would see the leader to succeed the ousted president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, could no longer be delayed. Recently Algeria has seen protests which are calling for the current prime minister’s departure; this comes after protest pressure forced Bouteflika to step down after twenty years in office. This is not the first time this year that elections were announced as the July 4 planned election was postponed due to a lack of candidates. The failure of the July elections left a constitutional vacuum in the country as the mandate of the interim head of state, Abdelkader Bensalah, had expired in the same month. To look at the leadership vacuum in Algeria and the roadmap to the possible elections later in the year we are joined by: • Dr Ahmed Jazbhay Senior Lecturer in Political Sciences at the University of South Africa • Ibrahima Kane, senior policy advisor at the Open Society Foundations Africa regional office