AFP
ALGIERS (AFP) – Algerian radical Islamist party leader Abdallah Djaballah said Tuesday there are signs of a plot to steal this week’s parliamentary elections, but that his party will win if the vote is clean.
“Some worrying signs make us fear a fraud,” Djaballah, who heads the Front for Justice and Development (FJD), told journalists.
He cited as examples “the circulation of ballots” and “the inflation of voter rolls, which include 65 percent of the population when usually they don’t go above 45 percent”.
He also said large numbers of army soldiers had registered after the deadline, accusing them of planning to cast both proxy and in-person ballots. He accused election officials of plotting to stuff ballot boxes with votes for parties aligned to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
If Thursday’s vote is “at least 80 percent honest”, FJD will take first place, Djaballah said.
There are 21.6 million voters registered for the polls, of a population of 37 million, according to the interior minister.
European Union observers have been granted access to district voter rolls, but not the national list as they had requested, the head of the monitoring mission said Monday.
Some 500 foreign observers are expected monitor the vote.
Djaballah’s victory guarantee echoes claims made Monday by the leader of the main Islamist electoral alliance, Green Algeria.
But analysts say Algeria’s Islamists, who have struggled to unite after the trauma of a 1991 election victory that provoked an army crackdown and a civil war, are too fragmented to win an outright majority of the enlarged national assembly’s 462 seats.
The current 389-member national assembly has 59 Islamists.
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