This article was taken from Menas Associates’ Algeria Politics & Security publication.

Since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s election victory in 2014, the Parti des Travailleurs’ (PT or Workers Party) PT leader, Louisa Hanoune, has increasingly been functioning as the most active and effective opposition to the regime. It is therefore unsurprising that government leaders — such as FLN General Secretary and RND leader Ahmed Ouyahia — now direct more of their fire against Hanoune than the CNLTD opposition alliance.

In the last few months, however, there have been moves to try and engineer a coup against Hanoune from within the party. Hanoune seems to claim that the Interior Ministry has been at the forefront of these moves. That may be the case, but most people believe that it is Saâdani who has been engineering it. For several months there had been rumours of ‘brown envelopes’ and other such bribes being offered to party members and officials.

The situation came to a head on 25 March at the party’s national conference, when Hanoune, quite rightly and in accordance with the party’s rules, called for an extraordinary party congress.

The outcome was that all those associated with the ‘reform’ movement, such as its leader Salim Labatacha MP and a dozen other executives, were voted off the Central Committee, which, with its new members, then proceeded to unanimously re-elect Hanoune as party leader.

To thunderous applause, the re-elected and strengthened Hanoune told part activists: ‘We are a genuine socialist party that belongs to the labour movement and our meeting today illustrates this attachment to this identity.’ Significantly, the former minister of culture Khalida Toumi, and the highly respected moudjahida Zohra Drif-Bitat — whom Saâdani allegedly removed recently from the Senate through ‘buying the votes’ of members — both attended the congress to lend their support to the party.

The party’s move is a blow to the government and especially Saâdani. It has strengthened the positions of both the PT and Hanoune, who can now be expected to concentrate her cutting opposition even more effectively against Saâdani; the influential Forum des chefs d’entreprises (FCE) president Ali Haddad; and the others whom she sees as comprising a ‘parallel power’ or ‘oligarchy’ as she calls it, that has effectively captured the state and is now seemingly bent on destroying it.