Low turnout in Algerian elections

Supporters of Algeria's president lost seats but kept a large majority in parliament, according to Friday's results from elections marked by record low turnout despite appeals for voters to cast a ballot against terrorism.

Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said the low participation rate in Thursday's election _ 35.7 percent of 18.7 million eligible voters _ showed that parties were out of touch with the people.

"It is perhaps the proof that the Algerian citizen expects the political class to adapt itself more concretely and more convincingly to the evolutions and transformations within Algerian society during the last few years," he said.

Joblessness, housing shortages and other social ills plague this North African nation of 33 million, despite its natural gas and oil wealth. The country has focused for 15 years on defeating an Islamic insurgency.

Just five weeks before the election, a double suicide bombing killed 30.

Al-Qaida in North Africa, a group formed from the remnants of Algeria's Islamic insurgency, claimed responsibility for the blast. A bombing in the eastern city of Constantine killed a police officer Wednesday, a day before the vote.

Government officials and parties had asked citizens to vote to protest violence by Islamic extremists, but the turnout was the lowest in a general election since Algeria did away with its single-party state in 1989.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was expected to revamp the government to reflect the election outcome. However, no date was given for any changes.

Many blamed weak parties and a rubber-stamp parliament combined with the strong presidency for the voter apathy.

"They don't have any prerogatives, they just approve laws and that's it," said Djamel Saidi, a 57-year-old shipping employee in the working class Algiers neighborhood of Bab el-Oued.

Saidi said he had voted for Bouteflika, 70, in the 2004 presidential election but had lost hope that lawmakers could resolve the country's problems.

"Young Algerians want to go abroad because they're not happy here, they can't find work," Saidi said. "I can't see the end of the tunnel."

Polling stations in Bab el-Oued were nearly deserted during the voting, a far cry from the activity during Algeria's first multiparty elections for parliament in 1991.

Then, the Bab el-Oued neighborhood, a former stronghold of the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front, known as FIS, was bubbling with expectations.

The army cut the voting short, aborting the elections when it became clear the Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win. The action triggered an Islamic insurgency and a spiral of violence that has killed an estimated 200,000 people.

The three-party "presidential alliance" backing Bouteflika's program of national reconciliation and economic reconstruction won 249 of the 389 seats in the lower house _ 35 short of its previous count.

The National Liberation Front, the party that has ruled Algeria for nearly three decades, lost 67 seats but remained dominant with 136 seats.

The two other parties in the alliance, the National Democratic Rally and the Movement for Society and Peace, a moderate Islamic party, both gained seats but not enough to make up for the losses.

Women won 28 seats, two more than in 2002.

So apathetic were voters that cries of fraud _ a mark of elections in Algeria _ were subdued.

Zerhouni said an investigation was launched into a single "serious" infraction in a polling station near the capital where ballot boxes had allegedly been found with votes inside before the polls opened.

He also said that a high number of blank ballots _ nearly 1 million, according to Interior Ministry figures _ showed that many Algerians had wanted to participate but had not been convinced by any of the parties or candidates.

These voters wanted "to express their rejection of violence, their rejection of terrorism, and show their desire to preserve the democratic process in this country," Zerhouni said.

Bouteflika has focused his efforts on a reconciliation process that aims to turn the page on Algeria's civil conflict, and the investment of more than $140 billion of oil and gas profits in roads, houses, schools and hospitals.

Rumors of ill health have dogged him since his hospitalization in Paris for nearly five weeks in 2005 for a reported stomach ulcer, creating lingering uncertainty about the country's political future.