The Public Portrait of a Gerontocrat

It is often said that the Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is aging and suffering from a wide range of sicknesses. Algerians mock him as a Micky Mouse president; he is short and old and there are many videos and images on the Internet of his face pasted to a dancing baby or cartoon character. Some of his public comments have been put into satirical hip hop songs or techno jams. One is not surprised given the nature of Algerian humor and his popularity among young people (which is generally low). How has Bouteflika’s public persona as reflected in his speeches and rhetoric changed over the twelve years he has been in power? What is he like in public?

His speeches can have a goofy and demagogic feeling to them which can be amusing. Bouteflika used to complement his tiny voice with a wide range of gestures and fist pounding, which he occasionally uses nowadays. As a politician, Bouteflika was a very fine public speaker, particularly when compared to his predecessors with Colonel Chadhli Bendjedid being a good example of one of the sadder public speakers in the Maghreb (Bouteflika is not as eloquent as Morocco’s Hassan II, though, and their styles were/are drastically different for rather different audiences. He is easier to listen to in Arabic than General Gaid-Salah who sounds rather gruff and unpleasant even for a military man, no offense to military men.) He sometimes makes jokes for the camera or puts on an energetic and angry tone, waving his finger in the air, seeming to jump up and down in his seat if giving a speech form behind a desk rather than a podium.

After a decade in power and the deterioration of his health (kidney troubles, ulcers and so on) Bouteflika is far less exciting though he still makes a fair amount of public appearances for someone in his condition. Bouteflika has had a long political career. It has been generally consistent over time though there are marked changes in the last few years and these are the result of natural causes rather than rhetorical strategy per se). He does not bang his fist as much these days and he is not capable on most days it seems of raising or inflecting his voice to the extent he did even three or four years ago. Readers can judge this for themselves: compare his speech on reform from earlier this year to his early campaign speeches or the speeches he made in his earliest ones as president. Or even compare his speeches from 2009 to those from this past year. He has aged (he is 74) though he still seems to favor dark three-piece suits almost year round and over time looks like he has taken to less and less busy ties (he always favored darker, more modest colors and even more so nowadays it seems). On occasion one will see Bouteflika in public wearing traditional clothes of whatever region he is visiting, a bournous here a djabellah there and so on. He dresses like an old man and has always embraced a public presentation that made him look grandfatherly or avuncular and he does not attempt to look younger than he is by dying his hair (like Mubarak and Ben Ali did for example) or the like. He embraces his age linking it to his revolutionary credentials and his association with Houari Boumediene. Of Algeria’s presidents, Bouteflika has built the closest thing to a personality cult without quite getting there in the proper sense (as seen here) and nothing quite on the order of the Moroccan monarchy or the As’ad or Mubarak or Qadhafite sort (Algerians react poorly to such things) and in the Arab context is not especially exceptional in this way.

Below are eleven videos. Most have years with them but some do not and readers are welcome to give their estimates or clarifications. All are in Arabic and/or French, some include remarks in Kabyle (by people who are not Bouteflika). No translations but non-Arabophone and Francophone readers will be able to make observations based on body language and inflection and tone and so on. Some are long and one can get a sense of them by clicking through the video. Your blogger realizes that this is a lot of Bouteflika and it is not meant as an endorsement but these are worth looking through given his health issues and that he has been in power for twelve years and the regime he heads up has thus far withstood the Arab uprisings. What is this very short man like in public? See for yourself. 

El-Amrani & Lindsay on Tunisia

Issandr El-Amrani and Ursula Lindsay have an excellent and exciting overview of the Tunisian elections at MERIP. The pair describe the performance and background of Nahdah, the major secular parties and the overall atmospherics of the poll and campaign. Your blogger has stated on this blog and elsewhere that while the Islamist tendency is important in Tunisia and elsewhere, it is worthwhile to pay attention to political trends outside that file. Even though an-Nahdah won a plurality of seats in the constituent assembly, it did not win a majority and the parties which won the rest are still important: an-Nahdah will not be able to act unilaterally and will before into coalitions and politics with other, mainly secular, parties as many observers have noted. El-Amrani and Lindsay do a terrific job at describing the main secular tendencies in the constituent assembly and why they performed the way they did and their attitudes and relationships with an-Nahdah. The conclusion:

The first post-Ben Ali government resulting from an election — Tunisia’s first free and fair one, at that — is likely to be composed of an Ennahda-CPR-Ettakatol alliance. With over 62 percent of seats in the constituent assembly, this coalition should be stable enough to provide a centrist consensus for both the constitution and government policy. Yet, even within this alliance, there are significant divergences over how to proceed with regard to the constitution and the mechanisms by which it will be decided, what kind of policies the interim government should (or has the legitimacy to) carry out, as well as negotiations over the government’s formation (with many secularists, for instance, weary of Ennahda’s interest in the education portfolio). The question of who will be Tunisia’s next president and whether the political system will be parliamentary (as Ennahda prefers) or semi-presidential (as CPR, Ettakatol and most other parties advocate) will also loom large over the next year. Reconciling these differences will not be easy, but at least, for the first time in its post-independence history, Tunisia has genuine politics.

They do not discuss the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT), which won just two seats, leaving market space open for others to cover that small party’s strategy and politics which are quite interesting if obscure (in fact, it seems most roundups omit the party because it won only two seats, which in some instances reflects writers’ ideological biases/ignorance (no names named) or, as is likely in this case, demands fo space and format and a careful consideration of the major power centers and what is most urgent for the reader; this blog has covered them as a matter of principle). Ettajdid (former communists; El-Amrani has written on some of their tendencies before) and PDM (mentioned in the piece) also deserve attention, having won seats and representing the left. Again, this blogger believe it is important to fill in the whole picture when it comes to the Arab countries that have seen uprisings. There are many more forces at work than just Islamist sects, as El-Amrani and Lindsay show here and others struggle to recognize.