Sahnouni: “No candidate vying for 2014 presidential polls can measure up to Bouteflika”

Former senior member of the disbanded FIS party, Hachemi Sahnouni, has asserted that the fragmented national political class, including the islamist parties, are quite unable to measure up to incumbent President Abdellaziz Bouteflika during the 2014 presidential elections owing to their dismal failure to agree on a consensus candidate likely to make a good showing in the upcoming electoral contest.

He described initiatives launched by some political opposition parties  as just a “cry in the valley”, and “a puff on the ashes”, stressing that the latter were interested in only the fourth term at stake with on prime focus the health condition of the President of the Republic with no clear-cut strategy for the immediate future.

In so doing, Hachemi Sahnouni told Echorouk that the opposition parties dealing in such a manner with the present political juncture were harmful to themselves, and in return they were just doing a great turn to the current authorities who take full advantage of the opposition’s fragmentation and disunity to beef up the presidential camp in expectation of the forthcoming polls.

 Sahnouni believes that those opposition figures who have so far declared their projected participation in the next presidential elections do not weigh much versus Bouteflika, at the political and popular levels, owing  to the President’s large popularity with large segments of the population as well as to his past  three straight  election wins since 1999.

 The opposition parties have ostensibly undermined their election chances by failing to agree on a sole consensus candidate who could face up with good prospects to the incumbent President, if ever Bouteflika declares overtly his keenness to run for a fourth new mandate, Hachemi Sahnouni underscored.

 He added that this political dilemma currently gripping the country’s opposition concerns the Islamist and the democratic poles alike as both are now stuck in a quandary with dim political prospects regarding the 2014 presidential electoral contest.