ALGIERS - Algerians vote Thursday in an election that is widely expected to see President Abdelaziz Bouteflika win a third five-year term in office, despite challenges from five rivals.
Although the outcome is seen by many Algerians as foregone conclusion, Bouteflika is urging citizens to give him a solid mandate to keep leading the North African nation where rising prices are the main preoccupation.
Five others are vying for the presidency, but none of them stand out against the 72-year-old head of state during an election campaign that has seen more organised rallies than open debate of the issues.
Bouteflika has ruled Algeria since 1999, when the whole opposition boycotted the polls. He was re-elected in 2004 with 84.99 percent of the vote, but again some of his rivals stayed out of the contest.
Louisa Hanoune, a Trotskyite, and Ali Fawzi Rebaine, a nationalist, are standing for a second time, but in 2004 -- when the abstention rate was high -- they respectively won only one percent and 0.63 of the votes. Less than 55 percent of the electorate then cast ballots.
The other candidates are Algerian National Front leader Moussa Touati, Belaid Mohand Oussaid, known as Mohamed Said, and Mohamed Djahid Younsi.
While his rivals were unable to mount big campaigns, Bouteflika has visited 32 of the 48 administrative departments in the largely desert nation that is four times the size of France. His followers organised 8,000 rallies.
The two main parties of the traditional opposition, the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and the Socialist Forces Front (FFS) are boycotting Thursday's election.
They are joined this time by Abdellah Djaballah, an influential figure who took 5.02 percent of the votes in 2004, but who dismissed this year's vote as "won in advance".
Bouteflika's election platform has linked a "strong and serene Algeria" with his track record in a decade of ending the worst of violence in Algeria which claimed at least 150,000 lives in the 1990s.
He has also produced a new development plan worth 150 billion dollars, with the building of one million new homes and the creation of three million new jobs in a country where unemployment is very high and youths and highly skilled workers alike try to seek greener pastures abroad.
Officially, unemployment stood at 11 percent of the work force in a population of almost 35 million in 2005, but Bouteflika's rivals say that the real figure is higher.
Hanoune, Bouteflika' sole woman rival, renowned for frank talk and work for women's and civic rights, argues that privatisation "put hundreds of thousands of people out on the street".
"We have an economy that wastes resources instead of creating wealth," economist Abdelhak Lamiri said. "What is needed is to make companies and institutions more efficient to create wealth with fewer resources."
Political analysts agreed that the high point of Bouteflika's campaign was a visit to Tizi Ouzou, capital of the Kabylie region that is the main homeland of Algeria's indigenous Berber people.
Bouteflika himself described his rally there as a "historic" event where he would "turn a new page" in relations after riots were sparked across the two Kabylie provinces in 2001 when police shot a local youth. More than 120 people were killed in that wave of violence.
Days later, the president dangled the prospect of a "possible general amnesty if the people consent to it" for extremists who are still active if they agree to lay down their arms.
Such an amnesty would be the latest move in Bouteflika's policy of national reconciliation, which he pushed through from 2000 by holding referendums on a programme to bring fundamentalist fighters out of hiding.
Several thousand men decided to surrender, but one group, Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, is still active and indeed operates beyond Algeria's borders in sub-Saharan Africa.
Before the campaign, Interior Minister Yahid Zerhouni said that "a few terrorist groups" were active "but currently in difficulty". Nevertheless, some 160,000 police will be deployed on polling day.
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