Day 2: Five flavours of « imppssible »

Jahid Younssi, the sixth candidate, and i say sixth because he is the least known in the six, and he is the one who said so bravely that it is « impossible for him to win these elections », and yet he is participating, such an attitude could be motivated by a simple reason, these three weeks of the campaign are the only time in the whole five years that the National television is opened wide, for people critisizing the politics and the gouvernment, but then again this is supposed to be enough to lead anyone to dispear, but not Mr Younssi, because first of all it is not even his party, it's the party of Mr Abdellah Djebellah, the main islamist figure in the Algerian politics, especially since the dissolution of the FIS the party which caused the whole ten bloody years in the nineties, and the death of Mr Mahfoud Nahnah, the leader of the Msp the other big Islamist party, and that his successor Mr AbuDjerra Sultani, has chosen to join the « presidential coalition » which shifted him from opposition to the same position of the FLN and the RND the parties of the reigning power

Now who can trust a man who betrayed his own leader ?, well nobody, but since he is not even expecting to win, you can't blame him.

The other Candidate is Mr Ali Fouzi Rebbaine the secretary general of the « AHD 54 » party, a party basically founded on the loyalty towards the principles of the revolution of 1954, which was an extraordinary act by all means (I mean the revolution), the problem of this party is that it only appears once every five years, to participate to the elections, lose, get a humiliating percentage, and come back to hibernation, and it is just one more occasion to hear the candidates representatives speaking the same things you see in the independant newspapers , who have the biggest readership in Algeria, so it is really some small oxygen tank, in a suffocating environment, because you just can't believe that this man can win, because even if there were important candidates, it would still be the same old story, of him losing.

and you have Mrs Louiza Hannoun, the only female candiate, and the candidate of the « labour party » of course it has nothing to do with the real labour party in britain, it is a party which has stragely kept the same dialogue throughout two decades to the third, and She was the one who famously was praised by president Bouteflika himself as « the person he thinks will succeed him » during a famous encounter with some French Congressmen.

the problem of Mrs Hannoun is that her popularity was eroded, because she has lowered her high critisizing tone to the governemtn, some say it's because of her selling her soul to the devil, for a luxury lifestyle in « Club Des Pins » the forbidden district where the officials and their families live.

Now does she have any chance to win, of course no, but she is a carismatic figure, and she is a gifted orator, and you gotta respect here somewhere just because she deosn't chew her words.

Mr Mouhamdi Said, the righteous heir of Mr Ahmed Taleb el Ibrahimi, Legendary figure in Algeria, who was robbed of his right to create a political party, but that's another story, started his campaign by visiting the grave of Houari Boumediene, the mythical Algerian president of the ¨ good years », then three days the grave of AbdulHamid IbnBadiss, the Algerian érudite, the Algerian equivalent to a Mahatma Ghandi, but campaigning in graves is surely a bad omen, because as everybody knows that dead people don't vote, unless you do it as a form of sarcasm like to say « my chances passed away » and then you might get something going there.

I dream sometimes of a perfect world, where the goverment allows true opposition to flourish without setting it up, and where the oppsition would promise doable things, and where they start practice democracy in their homes before asking the governemnt to do so, but this is just a dream, we are in the whole impossible realm, possible things get magnified until they become obsolete, and impossible things become theoritically possible, but only in the days of the presidential campaign.