Strikes in Algeria: a new wave of movement or an attack of the counter-revolution?

Abdelhakim Hazaqa - Algeria

At a critical time and with the countdown to the December 12 presidencies, the curve of professional and social protests is accelerating rapidly in Algeria, creating an unprecedented state of boiling in sectors that represent the country's economic and social public lifeline.

Teachers have been on a weekly strike since the beginning of the school year to settle pending demands for years before the judges joined them in a seven-day uninterrupted suspension of protest against transfers that touched 3,000 judges, accusing the government of infringing on the authority of justice.

In turn, workers at the Arzew Port Organization in Oran, Algeria's largest oil port, have denounced the administration's closure of negotiations with their representatives on extraordinary grants.

Taxi drivers in the capital also launched an open strike, with vigils in front of the headquarters of the Directorate of Transport until the fulfillment of the demands made to the concerned authorities.

The protest department widened the announcement by the Union of Public Banks to launch a national strike on Sunday (November 10th) to reject what it called the marginalization and exclusion of the social partner.

The chanting of the "general strike" was one of the strongest slogans of the demonstrators on the 37th Friday of the popular movement.

With mobility or against him?
The readings of the escalating backgrounds have varied in the current political context, with many interpretations linked to attempts by the resistance led by the "deep security state" and the remnants of Abdelaziz Bouteflika's rule to abort the army's plan to move to the New Testament.

"The presidential elections will be held on time, because the young people will thwart the gang's plans and tails who are accustomed to political blackmail," General Ahmed Qaid Saleh, the chief of staff, said in his latest speech.

"No one has the right to undermine the right of others to exercise their will by participating in the vote," President Abdelkader Bensalah said Thursday.

But other quarters reject these ready-made analyzes, and insist that what is happening is a new wave of revival of popular movement against the robbery of the military to rule through mock elections, in its view.

Hidden power
Analyst Driss Boulkaibat, a specialist in labor movements, said the strike was always a way of breaking bones and passing by force, whether organized or brutal, when the dialogue was deadlocked.

He explained that the events of October 1988 in Algeria began with a wave of massive strikes that swept most institutions, and then spiraled out of control, to have significant political repercussions, as happened in France, Chile and Poland in the seventies of the last century.

Polkaibat told Al Jazeera Net that "the return of strikes at this juncture and with a declared trade union framework raises doubts about the real intentions, because Algerians know for sure that the unions were never independent of power, but all civil society."

"Their actions may be at the behest of an invisible force that has been scaled up after the movement, but they still resist and refuse to enter into the road map drawn by the army to get the country out of the political crisis."

In other words, this force operating in the dark is moving its traditional arms - including unions - to contain the February 22 revolution, which may produce a counter-revolution as it did in 1992, he said.

Professional resistance
For his part, analyst Osman Lehiani stressed that the recent strikes - including the justice sector - can not be separated from the current political context.

However, he justified this by the relative liberalization of trade unions, which takes into account that institutional weakness is a precious opportunity to put pressure on power and achieve trade union gains. It is an achievement that may be apparent in fact, but it has to do with freedom from action and political domination over various aspects of institutional life. Judicial or economic.

"I do not think we are facing a counter-revolution," he told Al-Jazeera. "I wonder, counter-revolution against who, against power or against the movement?"

He explained, "I think that what is happening is part of the struggle of the will between the movement and its social parties and the power," adding that "professional resistance as well, because the symbolic demand for the movement was independence of justice, and the strike of judges carried the same demand, and the same applies to the strikes of the civil union coalition."

Risk of reluctance
Regarding the impact of the growing protest movements on the fate of the presidential elections, which the Independent Electoral Authority announced the acceptance of five candidates to compete in them, he stressed that Hayyani reinforces the factors of electoral abstinence, in addition to three other central reasons, confining them to the "path confused with stalled arrangements and generated a state of popular and political rejection of the Broad sector. "

He added that the list of candidates encourages the boycott as a whole represents the former regime, not to mention the absence of opposition parties that constitute popular mobilization machines.

He also stressed that the danger exists, because "counter-revolution does not bet on the enlightened category, but on the riffraff, which is easy to mobilize and pay as fuel."

He explained that it is exploiting the fragile economic situation, while the voice of enlightened power remains low, even absent from the scene and events, and deal with the difficult situation with worrying negativity, and this raises the level of danger to the upcoming presidential date, as he put it.