Four candidates in the starting blocs for the presidential elections

As time is running out to the deadline for the bring in of the candidates’ dossiers into the Constitutional Council for the upcoming presidential elections, four candidates only succeeded so far to meet the requirements concerning the number of signatures.

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• The ongoing president Abdelaziz Bouteflika leads the list followed by the head of the National Front Party, Moussa Touati than the Labor Party General Secretary Louiza Hanoun and at last the leader of the Islamic Party the National Conciliation Movement Djahid Younssi , while other candidates are still competing against time to collect signatures.
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• Backed by the presidential Alliance parties and major associations, M Bouteflika’s supporters talk about more than a million collected signatures instead of the initial 75 thousand ones.
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• The second contender M Moussa Touati was the first to announce his success in collecting the required signatures in a bid to refurbish his image towards the Constitutional Council after being excluded by the same institution in the 2004 presidential race for reasons, he believed, were purely political.
• As to the first woman candidate in this race, Louiza Hanoun passed the exam with flying colors in collecting more than 140 thousand signatures. The score was expected from a candidate who surprised the political scene in the 2004 presidential elections when she became the first lady in the Algerian modern history to run for presidency.
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