A new opposition front made up of 16 small political parties has announced at the close of a broad-based coordination encounter in Algiers that it will boycott the new National Popular Assembly by branding its election as “fraudulent”.

• Algeria’s May 10 legislative elections resulted in a crushing victory for the FLN (201 seats) and RND (70 seats) allowing the two allied parties to snatch the absolute majority (over 60%) in the new Assembly.

• Several opposition parties have claimed the election was rigged despite the clean slate for the polls issued by the foreign observation team deployed in various parts of the country to monitor the May 10^th voting operations.

• Lakhdar Ben Khellaf, spokesman for the small Islamist party “the Front for Justice and Democracy”, said Monday the new opposition alliance did not recognize parliament or the government, because of the “shameful fraud”, as he put it.

• The new opposition alliance holds just 28 seats of the 462-member legislative body.

• The largest Islamist party, “the Movement of the Society for Peace’ (MSP), while not part of this alliance, said over the weekend it would not join the new government.

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