“The President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Teboune, today signed the President’s decision relating to calling voters for legislative elections, the date of which is set for Saturday, June 12, 2021”, indicated by a brief presidential statement.

Legislative elections were scheduled to take place in 2022, but Teboune dissolved the National People’s Assembly (APN), the lower house of parliament, on 21 February, paving the way for this election.

The head of state, weakened by a lengthy hospitalization in Germany, shook power for two years.

A gesture of appeasement addressed to Hirak, a popular rebellion that forced his predecessor, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to resign in April 2019.

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But tens of thousands of Algerians took to the streets for three weeks, making a spectacular return of the weekly Hirak March, a year after the Kovid-19 pandemic broke out.

The protesters have continued to demand the abolition of the political “system” since Algeria’s independence (1962), synonymous with corruption and authoritarianism.

The next legislative election will be based on a new electoral law, which Tebubone also approved on Thursday.

This law specifically fixes the rules for financing and controlling electoral campaigns. Thus, it is prohibited for any candidate to receive donations in cash or donations from a foreign state or from a natural or legal person of foreign nationality.

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Teboune has already extended calls to “open the doors of Parliament to young people already”, believing that they should “have political debt”.

Abdelmadjid Teboune, a former Prime Minister during the reign of Budelflika, was widely boycotted by Hirak and political opposition on December 12, 2019.

Analysts said that since then he has been trying to get into the popular protest movement.

The previous legislative election in 2017 was won by the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Democratic Rally (RND) within a presidential coalition that supported former President Abdelaziz Boutaflika. Both these parties are now largely maligned.