Algerian politics: a written term limit and an unwritten army

What the current constitution locks in place

Algeria is a People's Democratic Republic, one and indivisible, under a constitution revised by referendum in November 2020. Britannica records that three-quarters of the electorate stayed away from that vote. The text is the latest in a line that runs through the constitution of 1989, which ended the one-party state, a revision by referendum in 1996, an amendment of 2008 that abolished presidential term limits, and amendments of 2016 that restored them.

Article 2 makes Islam the religion of the state. Article 3 makes Arabic the national and official language, and Article 4 gives Tamazight the same status and commits the state to promoting it in all its varieties. Britannica dates the steps: Arabic became the official language in 1990, Tamazight a national language in 2002 and an official one in 2016.

Article 234 then puts nine things beyond amendment:

An amendment normally starts with the president, passes both chambers in identical terms and goes to a referendum within 50 days. Article 232 offers a second route: if the Constitutional Court finds that a draft leaves the general principles and the balance of powers untouched, the president may promulgate it with the approval of three-quarters of both chambers and no popular vote.

How the presidency holds the executive

The president is elected by direct universal suffrage and must win an absolute majority of votes cast. A candidate has to be Muslim, at least 40 on election day, of native Algerian nationality with parents and spouse of the same, and resident in Algeria for the preceding ten years. Article 91 adds a test drawn from the war: a candidate born before July 1942 must prove participation in the Revolution of 1 November 1954, and one born after it must show that his parents took no part in acts hostile to it.

The powers in Articles 95 and 96 are wide: the president commands the armed forces and is responsible for defence, conducts foreign policy, chairs the Council of Ministers, calls referendums and appoints judges, the governor of the Bank of Algeria, the heads of the security organs and the walis who run the provinces. A state of emergency or siege may be decreed for 30 days and a state of exception for 60, each extended only with parliament's approval in joint session.

Some of these powers cannot be handed on: Article 97 forbids the president to delegate the appointment of the government, the calling of a referendum or the dissolution of the Assembly. The oath of office, sworn in the name of God before the people, binds the holder to the memory of the martyrs and to "the ideals of the eternal November Revolution", and so writes the war of 1954 into the first act of every term.

The government answers to both ends, because the president appoints the prime minister after consulting the parliamentary majority, and the head of government must put an action plan to the National People's Assembly. If the Assembly rejects it, the government resigns; if a second plan also fails, the Assembly is dissolved and new elections follow within three months.

The last presidential election, in September 2024, returned the incumbent with 84.3% of the vote on a turnout of 46.1%, according to Freedom House. The Constitutional Court had barred several candidates over the signatures they had collected, and the three campaigns jointly contested the preliminary figures, which had first put the winner at 95%.

Who sits in the two chambers of parliament

Legislative power belongs to a Parliament of two chambers. The National People's Assembly is elected directly for five years and, since 2020, no member may serve more than two terms. Freedom House gives it 407 seats. The Council of the Nation has 144 members serving six-year terms: two-thirds are elected indirectly, two for each wilaya, by the members of local and provincial assemblies, and one-third are appointed by the president from among national figures and experts. Half the Council is renewed every three years.

Two rules discipline members: a deputy or senator who voluntarily leaves the party under whose label he was elected forfeits the seat, while one expelled by the party keeps it as an unaffiliated member. Each chamber's rules must also sanction members who miss committee and plenary sittings.

Turnout has been the recurring measure of consent. Freedom House gives 23% for the early legislative election of June 2021, which Hirak supporters boycotted and in which women won 8% of the seats; Britannica calls it the lowest turnout in a parliamentary election since independence. The Assembly's tenth legislature followed the election of 2026, and on 30 September 2026 its own site listed the groups below.

The RND was created in 1997 and won 156 of 380 seats in its first election. The constitution entitles the opposition to a monthly session on its own agenda in each chamber and to refer laws to the Constitutional Court.

Why every account weighs the army

The constitution makes the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Freedom House describes political life as long dominated by a closed elite based in the military and the FLN, calls the military the most powerful political actor in the country and its historical arbiter of policy disputes, and notes that elected leaders have relied on its support to stay in office. It attributes the resignation of April 2019 in large part to the loss of that support.

Two dated events sit behind that description. The army cancelled the election of January 1992, and in March 2019 its chief of staff called for the president to be declared unfit before he resigned. Britannica records that the Department of Intelligence and Security, widely thought to function as a state within a state, was dissolved in January 2016 and replaced by an agency under the presidency. Algeria: history follows the army from the war of independence.

Conscription supplies more than half of the active troops, who serve six months with a further year of civic service, and Britannica notes that paramilitary and police forces outnumber the active military by a wide margin.

How the courts and elections are supervised

Britannica describes a judiciary of three levels: tribunals of first instance, a provincial court sitting as a three-judge panel in each wilaya, and the Supreme Court at the top. The constitution of 1996 added a Council of State for administrative cases and a Tribunal of Conflicts to settle disputes between the two.

The system was rebuilt early, when a decree of 1965 replaced the colonial dual structure of sharia courts and French civil courts, and new penal, penal procedure and civil procedure codes followed in 1966. A Court of State Security of magistrates and senior army officers was set up in 1975 for cases touching state security.

The Constitutional Court, created in 2020, has twelve members. The president appoints four, including its head; the Supreme Court and the Council of State elect two each; and the heads of the two chambers appoint two each from outside parliament and outside any party. Members serve one six-year term.

Elections were run by the Interior Ministry until protest forced the creation of the Independent National Authority for Elections (ANIE) after 2019. Freedom House reports that the barring of candidates in 2024 and the contested preliminary result raised doubts about the authority's independence, and that judges are appointed by a High Council of the Judiciary chaired by the president.

What limits apply to parties and the press

Parties must be approved by the Interior Ministry, and the constitution bars any political association founded on differences of religion, language, race, gender or region. The Islamic Salvation Front has been banned since 1992. In 2023 the Council of State closed every office of the left-wing Democratic and Social Movement and suspended its activities, and in August 2024 about 20 activists of the Rally for Culture and Democracy were briefly detained on their way to a commemoration at Ifri. In 2021 the High Security Council designated Rachad, which includes former FIS members, and the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK) as terrorist organisations.

Freedom House reports a narrowing of space since 2019: a media law of 2023 requires journalists to hold a permit from the information ministry and bars outlets from foreign funding; a penal code published in May 2024 punishes sharing undefined confidential information and criticising officials or the security forces online; and a union law of 2023 recognises a union as representative only where it enrols at least 25% of a sector's employees. The 2006 reconciliation law made public discussion of the fate of those who disappeared in the 1990s a criminal matter.

On 17 March 2020, citing the pandemic, the government banned marches and rallies. Hirak demonstrations resumed in 2021 and met increasing repression, and by 2024, Freedom House reports, no large-scale Hirak protest took place.

How the wilayas are governed

Algeria is divided into 69 wilayas and 1,541 communes. Each wilaya is headed by a wali appointed by the president and answerable to the Minister of the Interior, and is divided into daïras and then communes. Both the wilaya and the commune elect an assembly, and those assemblies in turn elect two-thirds of the Council of the Nation. The arrangement keeps the centre's appointee and the local vote side by side in every province. The local vote has at times gone its own way: in the elections of 1990 and 1991, Britannica records, Amazigh parties won control of local assemblies in Kabylia while the Islamic Salvation Front took most councils elsewhere.

Who Algeria stands with abroad

Britannica sums up Algerian foreign policy since independence as revolutionary in word and pragmatic in deed. In its first decades the country backed liberation movements, North Vietnam and the end of apartheid, mediated the release of the United States hostages in Iran in 1981 and positioned itself outside both Cold War blocs. It joined the Arab League in 1962 and OPEC in 1969, and belongs to the African Union and the Arab Maghreb Union, founded in 1989.

Western Sahara has shaped relations with Morocco since 1975. Algeria supports the Polisario Front, and Freedom House counts about 175,000 Sahrawis in refugee camps near the border, present since 1975. After a border war in 1963 and several breaks and restorations, Algeria cut diplomatic ties with Morocco in August 2021, and the gas pipeline to Spain through Morocco closed later that year. This catalogue records the Western Sahara dispute and takes no position on it. On the southern borders the pressure runs the other way: Freedom House cites the NGO Alarme Phone Sahara for about 20,000 migrants deported between January and September 2024, some left at the desert frontier.

Relations with France turn on the colonial past. Britannica notes the nationalisations of 1963 and 1971 and that in 2012 a French president acknowledged the suffering colonial rule caused without giving the full apology Algerian officials sought. In September 2026 Algeria severed diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates.