Algeria: An Alarming No Vote

Given the warning flares that went up as far back as June 1990, when the Islamic Salvation Front coasted to easy victory in Algeria's municipal races, expectations were high that fundamentalists would score well in the country's first free parliamentary election. Even so, shock waves rattled both the Arab and Western worlds last week, when Islamists walked away with almost half the national vote, despite competition from 40 other political parties. In the first round of balloting, fundamentalists secured 188 of 206 seats and were poised to win enough of the 224 remaining seats in a runoff election on Jan. 16 to obtain a sizable parliamentary majority. Meanwhile, the National Liberation Front, which has ruled Algeria with an autocratic hand since independence in 1962, emerged with a humiliating 15 seats.

The scope of the fundamentalist mandate immediately gave rise to doomsday visions of an Algeria cloaked in black robes and veils, a Koran clutched in one hand, the other the clenched fist of religious fanaticism. But there was actually little to suggest that the north African country was about to return to the Middle Ages any time soon. Cool-headed analysts mostly regarded the vote as less an embrace of fundamentalism than a sharp renunciation of the socialist National Liberation Front, which has run the country's economy into the ground through corruption, mismanagement, nepotism and sloth.

Still, the Islamists' public embrace of Koranic law raised fears that the chilling penal law, known as Shari'a, might be enforced, giving rise to such practices as flagellations, stonings and limb amputations. Moreover, Islamic leaders have repeatedly stated that mothers should attend to their children, and therefore should not hold a job outside the home. The fundamentalists also champion segregation of the sexes in both the workplace and schools.

If all of this sounds eerily like Iran, a mix of historical, political and cultural factors set Algeria's experience apart. Unlike the popular uprising that swept the Shah from power in 1979, Algeria's fundamentalists are ascending to legislative power by the say-so of voters who have given indications that they are as little interested in the tyranny of Islamists as they are in the tyranny of corrupt socialists.

Moreover, Algeria's political convulsion is less like Iran's than like Jordan's: in 1989 King Hussein, similarly beset by a disintegrating economy, permitted open parliamentary elections that resulted in the seating of a large fundamentalist block. Nonetheless, Jordan's ties to the West and its moderate course remain largely intact.

In Algeria last week, the Islamic tide met with strong resistance. In the capital, 300,000 people turned out shouting, "No to fundamentalism!" Apparently emboldened by the protests, the government announced that it was investigating first-round irregularities in 145 contests that could deprive the Islamic Front of many of its seats.