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Faced with geostrategic tensions and development challenges, the urgency of overhauling political parties and civil society
Algeria
It is clear, at the start of the 21st century, that traditional political parties and civil societies have less and less impact on the mobilization of citizens, often disconnected from internal realities and new global changes. New social networks with the upheaval of artificial intelligence are increasingly shaping behavior.
Faced with the distress of populations faced with an increasingly unequal distribution of national income, both internally and globally, undermining social cohesion, which cannot mean distributing income without productive counterparts which paradoxically, in the long term, slows down development and increases inequalities, populist currents are emerging. This is not specific to Algeria, with a specificity, the strong dependence on the revenue from hydrocarbons which directly and indirectly irrigate the economy and society.
1. For the majority of official political parties, their presence is done in a formal and ostentatious manner during elections filling the void, almost always powerless to influence the course of things and to clearly formulate the concerns and aspirations of real society. Due to the internal crises which shake them periodically, the discredit which strikes the majority of them, the distrust which is nourished towards them, the political groups have a weak capacity to carry out effective mobilization and supervision work, to contribute significantly to political socialization and therefore to make an effective contribution to the work of national recovery. These are sufficiently important reasons to seriously consider reorganizing the party system so that it can fulfill its function in any democratic political system, having to leave it to the market and not to the administration through the creation of artificial parties, to measure the weight of each Party according to the number of its real members. Indeed, the discredit which strikes political groups must give way to credible groups, assuming an objective assessment of the status and the role which must be theirs in a society which aims to join the rank of developed societies, especially since for the years to come, the delayed reforms will be very painful. The majority of official parties live on the transfer of income and not on the basis of contributions from their members, only manifest themselves during electoral events.
For so-called official civil society, the supposed independents whose repentants are often welcomed with great fanfare by the official authorities, what is a paradox is that the confusion which currently prevails in the national associative movement makes it difficult to develop a strategy aimed at its support and mobilization. Its diversity, the political-ideological currents that run through it and its complex relationship with society and the State add to this confusion and make it imperative to reflect beyond the simple framework of this contribution. Formed in the wake of the political struggles which dominated the first years of the democratic opening of the 1990s, Algeria having experienced until 1999 a long period of instability due to terrorism, civil society will split into four fundamentally different segment societies, three at the level of the real sphere and one dominant in the informal sphere. The largest segment, privileged and often the only interlocutor of public authorities, are civil societies located on the periphery of the parties in power where those responsible are sometimes deputies, senators, living largely from the transfer of income. We have a civil society firmly anchored in the Islamist movement, with certain segments being the appendage of legal Islamic parties. We have a civil society claiming to be part of the democratic movement, weakly structured, despite the relatively large number of associations that make it up, and undermined by contradictions relating, among other things, to the question of leadership. And finally, we have an informal, unorganized, totally atomized civil society which is by far the most active and the most important with precise codifications forming a dense network and without its integration, not through authoritarian bureaucratic measures, we cannot count on a real revitalization of civil society.
2.-What prospects? The results of the various elections in Algeria, whether presidential, national (deputies) or local, over the last three decades, have clearly shown that political parties and the different segments and civil society whose function is decisive as political, social and economic intermediation in order to avoid direct confrontation between security services and citizens in the event of social unrest, referring to national security, have had a limited impact. Because to be able to mobilize, in addition to the morality of leaders referring us to the analyzes of the great North African sociologist Ibn Khaldoun on morality, the partisan system and civil society must be at the service of the citizen and not in the wake of customer relations. For the mobilization of citizens, this makes urgent the restructuring of the partisan system and official civil society, which nevertheless benefits from a substantial state budget and that only two institutions hold Algeria, the ANP and the security forces in all their components, for the stability and defense of the territory and on the economic level Sonatrach which with the derivatives recorded in the non-hydrocarbon section for 67% in 2024, according to official government statistics, represents 98% of revenues of exports in the country’s currencies. This makes it urgent to have another approach that sticks to reality. Because, when a State wants to impose its own rules disconnected from social practices, society gives birth to its own rules which allow it to function with its own organizations. The revitalization of political parties and civil society in order to make them an effective instrument for guiding active forces and a powerful lever for mobilizing them with a view to their active involvement in society only has a chance of succeeding if the movement which composes it is not at the service of unmentionable and sometimes dubious personal ambitions. Also, faced with future economic, social and cultural tensions and increasingly heavy external constraints, it is urgent that a true national strategy of adaptation to new geostrategic issues and new global economic changes directs us towards a new world order where any nation that does not advance necessarily retreats, existing in any society in a static situation (see value and growth – work by Professor Abderrahmane Mebtoul – Office of University Publications – Algiers 1983-120 pages -: the theory of thermodynamics applied to the analysis of society and program of the Algerian Association of Market Economy (ADEM), widely distributed worldwide in English-Arabic and French between 1992/1993 of which I had the honor of being president from 1992 to 2016). All this refers to a renewal of governance and therefore to the rebuilding of the State inseparable from the acceleration of global reform. However, the bitter observation is that paradoxically when the value of hydrocarbon rent increases, reforms are slowed down, witnessing a passive redistribution of rent for ephemeral social peace. This contradictory rent/reform couple explains the legal instability and the lack of coherence in the overall reform, the winners of tomorrow not necessarily being those of today. The transition from the State of “support” to the State of justice is from my point of view a major political bet, because it quite simply implies a new social contract and a new political contract between the nation and the State and that Algeria can only return to itself if false privileges are banned and the criteria of competence, loyalty and innovation are established as gateways to success and social promotion by reconciling modernity while preserving its authenticity. It is no longer permitted, thanks to financial ease, to continue to spend lavishly and import instead of favoring local production based on local or foreign wealth-creating businesses implying a clear political will to move towards a competitive market economy with a social purpose. This is why the refoundation of the State implies adjustments in the organization of power which must pose the strategic problem of the future role of the State in economic and social development and which must not obscure the needs for autonomy of local authorities which must be restructured according to their anthropological history and not according to electoral or clientelist needs. The refoundation of the State cannot be limited to a technical reorganization, creation of new wilayas which must not confuse necessary decentralization with deconcentration, thanks to new technologies facilitating rapprochement with distant citizens. The autonomy of local authorities does not mean autonomy from central power but an act which strengthens the role of civil society in order to transform local “welfare” communities into “common enterprise”. This assumes that all components of society are involved in the decision-making process which involves the configuration of the territory, in order to strengthen social cohesion and economic efficiency through real decentralization around six to seven major regional economic hubs, driven by regional chambers of commerce bringing together public and private companies, banks, universities, research centers, unions, civil society networks, with central and local authorities serving as facilitators and regulators.
In summary, there exists, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amara Sen has shown, a dialectical link between the rule of law – democracy, which is a long process that must tolerate contradictory productive ideas, and development, taking into account the cultural anthropologies of societies, which cannot ignore its history and traditions for Africa, and security and development. Also, it is illusory to ignore the political and social factor which allows citizen mobilization and to want to base development on administrative networks, which will necessarily reinforce bureaucratization, a blocking factor and corruption. Algeria, a country with strong potential, can become between 2028/2030, subject to profound reforms, a pivotal country, a factor in the security of the Mediterranean and African areas. The solution is essentially internal and it is up to Algerian citizens and them alone to realize this hope in order to achieve harmonious development reconciling economic efficiency and profound social justice within a world in full upheaval, never forgetting that the wealth of a Nation comes from work and not from ephemeral income.
Abderrahmane Mebtoul
University Professor
International expert