Tebboune Re-elected: Algeria President Secures Landslide Victory with 94.7% Votes
Algeria's President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, 78, has been re-elected with 94.7% of the votes, according to Al Jazeera. The National Independent Authority for Elections (ANIE) announced Tebboune's victory amidst allegations of vote manipulation by challengers. Algeria continues its social spending agenda amid rising energy revenues.
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- Algeria
Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the 78-year-old incumbent President of Algeria, has been re-elected with a commanding 94.7% of the votes, as reported by Al Jazeera citing the country's electoral authority, ANIE. The announcement came on Sunday from ANIE head Mohamed Charfi, confirming that the independent candidate won a sweeping majority in the Saturday polls.
Charfi revealed that out of 5.63 million recorded voters, 5.32 million cast their ballots for Tebboune. The army-supported president faced minimal competition from conservative Abdelaali Hassani Cherif of the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP), who garnered just 3% of the votes, and socialist Youcef Aouchiche of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), who obtained 2.1%.
Hassani Cherif's campaign raised allegations of polling staff being pressured to inflate Tebboune's results and failures in delivering vote-sorting records. They pointed to instances of proxy voting but did not clarify whether these alleged violations impacted the final outcome. ANIE's Charfi asserted that the election team strove for transparency and fair competition.
Earlier, ANIE had reported a provisional voter turnout of 48%, though it withheld specifics regarding the breakdown of registered versus actual voters. Tebboune's victory signals the continuation of a governance strategy marked by increased social spending, bolstered by rising energy revenues since his initial election in 2019 following a period of low oil prices.
Furthermore, Algeria has formally applied to join the BRICS group and submitted a request to become a shareholder member of the BRICS Bank as of July 22 last year. President Tebboune stated that Algeria's first contribution to the bank would be USD 1.5 billion, as reported by the Algerian daily An-Nahar Al-Jadid.
(With inputs from agencies.)