ABSTRACT
In November 2000, a year and half into Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s first term in office, a group of young officers led by Mohamed Touati – considered as the army’s ideologue – were given the task of devising a strategy to get the country out of its decade-long political stalemate.198 The document they drafted provides an interesting insight into the way the Algerian army conceived its role in fixing the failures of Algeria’s political change. Besides portraying ‘the current crisis [as] the result of the biases introduced by the democratisation process since its launch’, the document advocated ‘a complete reconstitution of [Algeria’s] political landscape’. According to the army’s analysis, since the introduction of political pluralism, Algeria’s parties had mainly succeeded in generating popular discontent with clear repercussions on the country’s political stability and reputation abroad. As to a solution, the document called for ‘the dissolution of all political parties’ present on the political spectrum, a threeyear break with party politics, followed by a reconstitution of parties under different names and different rules of the game.199
