TV pictures of ailing Pt Bouteflika trigger divisive reactions from the national political class”

The leader of the justice and development party, Abdallah Djaballah, has affirmed that the visit paid on Tuesday by Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal and the Army chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Salah Gaid to President Bouteflika at the Invalides medical establishment in Paris, has brought nothing new concerning the power-vacuum behind by the head of state for over 45 days now since his admission to the Valles de Grâce military hospital in the French capital.

Mr Djaballah said that the running of the state affairs required in principle a President safe and sound and hale and hearty and not deprived of his main faculties as it is the case now with illness-stricken Bouteflika.

Djaballah further asserted that given the current sickness situation, it was imperative to implement article 88 of the constitution stipulating a vacancy of power because of the President’s blatant health incapacity.

For his part, the leader of the FNA party, Moussa Touati, said that the TV pictures showing President Bouteflika did not reflect a man physically and mentally fit and is seemingly not able to pursue his bounden activities at the helm of the nation.

Mr Moussa Touati further accused the authorities of deceiving and despising the Algerian people through mendacious and sweeping statements about the President’s true health condition stressing that the latter were playing for time in order to find their chosen successor to President Abdellaziz Bouteflika whose political demise is in the offing, he said.

In his reaction, the secretary general of the national reform movement, Djahid Younsi, Said that the visit paid by Sellal and Salah Gaid to ailing Bouteflika in Paris was too belated as it has opened the door to all rumours and to all speculations.

Mr Younsi pointed out that the protocol apparatus had not been duly respected as senior members of the constitutional council could have been more suitable for a visit to President Bouteflika in Paris.

He also indicated that the ins and outs surrounding the health condition of a President of the Republic should be made public regularly by a bona-fidé medical staff and not by political figures who have nothing to do with medicine and whose only goal is to ensure their political survival by hook or by crook in total defiance of the Algerian people’s sovereignty, as he put it.

For their part, the representatives of the FLN, RND and FFS parties refused to make any comment on President Bouteflika’s illness arguing a heavy schedule of activities.