In Oran, Tebboune Delivers a Disjointed and Anachronistic Speech Tinged with Populism

On Sunday, August 25, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the candidate for his own re-election, held his second campaign rally in Oran, the capital of the country’s west, a week after his first rally in Constantine.

By Hichem ABOUD

In a hall filled with civil servants brought in from more than fifteen provinces and municipal agents from all the communes in the west of the country, along with plainclothes police and military personnel, Abdelmadjid Tebboune failed to impress with an incoherent and disjointed speech.

Moving from the east to the west of the country, Gaza’s number one supporter broadened his scope. He extended his discourse to the entire Palestine. He also buried his warlike rhetoric and dropped promises of invading Gaza with an army ready to fight the Zionist enemy, later retracting by declaring that this army would instead be tasked with building three hospitals in 20 days—a feat this army is far from achieving in Algeria.

In Oran, Tebboune assured that “Palestine will always be well supported as long as Algeria stands strong.” Unlike in Constantine, he mentioned the Polisario, speaking about it excessively as if he were the decision-maker or the leader of a power capable of guaranteeing the inevitability of a Sahrawi state—a state he avoids mentioning or calling for support at international conferences, even when he hosted the Arab League summit in November 2022.

Running out of ideas and devoid of any project for his second term, Tebboune found nothing else to promise other than salary increases and the construction of 450,000 housing units—two promises that are not within the purview of a head of state. Salary increases, everywhere in the world, are a common practice. They cannot be considered an objective or an achievement, as they merely follow global inflation. As for housing, Tebboune, who cannot shed his image as Minister of Housing, seems unaware that it is not the state’s role to build housing to be freely given to citizens. This does not happen anywhere. All the state can do in terms of housing is facilitate the acquisition process for land, whether for individuals or real estate developers. It can assist the needy with social aid for acquiring property, but no more than that. We have never heard a presidential candidate, whether in Africa or Asia, promise a specific number of housing units to be constructed.