This article was taken from our Algeria Politics & Security publication.

Algeria’s stability has been premised in part on the ability of its government to pay its way out of social and economic grievances expressed by its citizens. Even as recently as last year, as the oil price continued its downward slide, the state responded to protests over issues such as housing and wage shortages with payment promises.

Now, though, the Algerian economy in general is suffering as a result of the state’s dependence on the declining income from energy sales for much of its revenue. Although the government has said that any austerity measures it undertakes will be crafted in such a way as to avoid hurting the poorest Algerians, it has little funding to spare for the many Algerians who are already being hurt.

What the government most fears is these grievances coalescing into public protests with the capacity to spread. As Algeria Politics & Security reports, sporadic but significant examples of such demonstrations are now occurring, with the most marginalised regions of the country’s south being the most vulnerable to instability in the future.

In particular, last week saw unrest in Ouargla, and these protests have the potential to both escalate and spread. Unemployment protests are a frequent occurrence in Ouargla, which is seen as the centre of the country’s oil industry, but they are commonplace in almost every administrative centre, especially in the Saharan regions.

A local journalist commenting on the unrest in Ouargla, Boushret Abdul Hai, told the Middle East Monitor publication that: ‘Several provinces in the south witness almost daily protests organised by job seekers demanding jobs. The authorities often tell them that jobs are available in construction and agriculture projects but not in the oil companies.’

The latest demonstrations took what appears to be a new turn about three weeks ago when six job seekers sewed their mouths shut and did not stop their protest until the authorities promised to provide them with jobs. On 21 February, as many as 15 job-seekers in Ouargla protested in the same way, sewing their mouths shut in the presence of the police. Two of them were reportedly taken to Ouargla’s Mohamed Boudiaf hospital later in the evening following seizures.

One of the protesters said: “We demanded several months ago to attend a committee to investigate cases of law violation during recruitment by oil companies, but the authorities refused our requests and so we decided to escalate our protest.”

Sources have told us that the protest took another turn on 24 February when five unemployed people, with naked torsos and nooses hung around necks, slashed their arms with knives and shouted to the gathering crowd that ‘they drive us to suicide, and we will do it.’ One of them reportedly shouted out: ‘It is better to die than to suffer this humiliation, Ouargla is the cemetery of the unemployed.’

It is difficult to foresee whether this new form of self-harming protest will gather pace, and become a wider or even national movement in the same way as the anti-shale gas protests did. But there already reports of larger protests being planned for March.