Ould Abbas Confuses The Political Scene With Vague Statements

Recent statements that were made by the General Secretary of the National Liberation Front (FLN) party, Djamal Ould Abbas, on the presidential elections have led to a number of questions about the fate of Bouteflika’s fifth term, which is still a project.

After a marathon tour with his political partners in order to rally support for the fifth term, Ould Abbas launched, on Tuesday, exciting statements, after his meeting with the head of the party Amal Algeria Rally (Tadj), Ammar Ghoul.

He spoke about continuity, which means FLN’s nomination of Bouteflika to run for another Presidential Term, but he spoke in turn about handing over the torch to what he called the “emerging generations”, in a more recent trend of confusion in the understanding of many observers.

“The year 2019 is the year of the Presidential Elections, and it also means the visa for the future of the coming generations to deliver the generation of November,1st, the torch of the rising generations”, said the party’s secretary-general, who brings to memory the President’s speech in 2015 when he talked about handing over the torch to new generations.”

“We are building for the new generation, we are not thinking about electing Abdelaziz Bouteflika, because the president does not need an election campaign”, Ould Abbas said.

“These words have made the situation more ambiguous, because the man only talked about the fifth term”.

This is not the first time that the first man in FLN spoke in this way, as he has already said that he will not stop appealing to the president to run for a fifth term, but he will come down at the president’s request if he decides to rest, which was the response of Ould Abbas, to the head of the General Secretary of the Popular Movement, Amara Ben Younes, who criticized the calls to seek the imposition of the fifth term on President Bouteflika.

The words of Ould Abbas are somewhat contradictory with the statements that were made by the General Secretary of the National Democratic Rally party, Ahmed Ouyahia, on Tuesday, during his meeting with Ammar Ghoul, in which he considered the call for the fifth term a preliminary talk, because it is based on the achievements of the past two decades, President Bouteflika’s term.

The controversial statements of Ould Abbas come at a time when the pro-government parties have moved to the opposite attack by mobilizing support for the fifth term, as their parties’ meetings are almost daily, while the absence of Amara Ben Younes party remains a mystery and raises more than one question, whether he moved to the other camp, or does he maneuver for a better location in the coming weeks.

All this comes at a time when the “National Consensus” initiative that was launched by the Movement for a Peace Society is declining after being met with reservations by the most representative and dominant power parties in the scene, the National Liberation Front and the National Democratic Rally.