Every Friday since 22 February 2019, thousands of Algerians have taken to the streets across the country. Having managed in April to overthrow their autocratic leader of 20 years, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the peaceful uprising, dubbed the ‘revolution of smiles’, has turned its attention on Le Pouvoir (‘The Power’) – a shady coterie of business people, military personnel and ruling-party politicians – who propped up Bouteflika’s regime. The slogan ‘the people want them all to go’ has become the rallying call.
With close to half of Algeria’s 42 million population under the age of 28, it’s the young who are driving the movement. ‘At first we just wanted to stop Bouteflika’s fifth term, but this evolved, and we began to see that total regime change was possible, that we had real power,’ says Hamza Zait, a journalist and PhD student from the capital, Algiers.
