Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who has faced criticism for cracking down on dissent since mass protests in 2019, is set to face two challengers in the upcoming election on September 7, election organisers announced Thursday.
The two candidates who have qualified to challenge Tebboune are Abdelaali Hassani from the moderate Islamist party, the Movement of Society for Peace, and Youssef Aouchiche from the center-left Socialist Forces Front.
Thirteen other hopefuls failed to gather the necessary number of signatures to secure their candidacies.
Tebboune, who was elected in 2019 with 58 percent of the vote after months of pro-democracy protests, declared in March that the presidential election would take place on September 7.
A former prime minister under the long-serving president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was ousted during the 2019 protests, Tebboune has since been accused of intensifying a crackdown on the Hirak movement that initiated the protests.
During the Covid pandemic, Tebboune’s administration leveraged restrictions on gatherings to ban Hirak demonstrations and increased prosecutions of dissident activists, journalists, and academics.
In February, Amnesty International reported that five years after the protests began, Algerian authorities continued to limit the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
