The return of the FIS?

The Front Islamique du Salut

Think of them as ISIS without the guns.

‘It’s Time to Break the Chains.’ Algerians Seek a Revolution.

The protesters’ demands are unambiguous: After two decades of undivided reign, Mr. Bouteflika, his clan, and his system must go.

. . . .

“We feel like we’ve been violated for 20 years,” said Haid Mohamed Islam, a 27-year-old doctor standing outside the modernistic national library on a recent wind-swept day. 

“It’s time to break the chains.”

While it remains far from clear what happens next, a sense that change is inevitable is sweeping the country.

. . . .

State news media, at first barred from covering the protests, have begun reporting on them. “The Street Is Not Backing Down,” was the banner headline in the daily Liberté on Wednesday.

The ruling National Liberation Front and the army have joined the chorus of praise for the demonstrators, with the chief of staff hailing their “unequaled sense of civic responsibility.”

. . . .

For decades, Algeria was seen by allies on both sides of the Atlantic as a bulwark against the regional Islamist threat. 

After the army brutally crushed an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, the military chose Mr. Bouteflika, a wily ex-foreign minister whose political roots go back to the earliest years of Algerian independence, to lead the country.

Algerians welcomed the end of the nearly decade-long conflict and accepted Mr. Bouteflika with it, an arrangement made even easier as oil money began flowing freely in the early 2000s, and with it generous social benefits.

In 2011, Algeria proudly rode out the Arab Spring, its leaders mocking the reckless, pro-democracy demonstrators in neighboring countries even as they shut the country off from the outside world.

. . . .

Mr. Bouteflika also cloistered himself. 

According to journalists and political scientists here, he has never given an interview in the Algerian news media in his two decades in office. 

Since his stroke, even his body has disappeared: He has been replaced in public appearances by his framed portrait, known here as “the frame.”

There were few complaints. 

Large public works programs and free loans to young people, financed by the country’s oil and gas wealth, kept citizens content and quiescent.

A top member of the governing coalition, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely, said the Bouteflika system was built on patronage and corruption. 

With oil fetching high prices, “money flowed like water,” he said. 

“There was corruption in bidding. Easy bank loans. People got rich on public money.”

But in 2014, the prices of oil and gas, which account for 97 percent of the country’s exports, started falling. 

Unemployment among the young bit deeply as the government cut social benefits.

Last month, when Mr. Bouteflika announced he would run for a fifth term, the bottom fell out. 

Algerians had had enough of his system, and his physical incapacity became a metaphor for the withering country.

. . . .

But it is the central demand of the protesters, that the whole Bouteflika system must go, that would be hardest to satisfy, government insiders and analysts here say.

“The clan that governs this country isn’t going to just let go just like that,” said Zoubir Arous, a leading sociologist, as he watched a stream of chanting youth, many draped in the Algerian flag, march on a downtown street. 

“It’s a question of life or death for them.”