Abdelaziz Bouteflika

President; Minister of National Defense

Date of Birth: 02/03/1937
Place of Birth: Oudja, Morocco

Biography: Joined the Front de Liberation Nationale, 1956; Administrative secretary to Houari Boumedienne Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1963-70; self-imposed exile, 1981-87; President, 1999 to date.

Commentary: President of Algeria since winning a disputed 81% of the vote, with the backing of the army, in 1999. Bouteflika was re-elected with 90.24% of the vote, from a 74.6% turnout in Presidential elections in 2009. Since there was no heavyweight candidate to stand against him, the re-election was little surprise, more surprising, given the general apathy and the outright anger with the regime in parts of the country, was the 74.6% turnout announced by Interior Minister Nourredine ‘Yazid’ Zerhouni, a long-standing friend of the President.

Bouteflika has been holding crisis talks since wide-scale popular unrest in early January 2011, well before the Egyptian protests and even before President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali had to leave Tunisia. Protests about rising prices in Algiers have left at least five people dead, 800 injured and over 1,000 young people arrested in the working class  district of Bab el Oued.

Bouteflika alternates between promises to liberalise the emergency laws and cracking down hard.