TUNISIA: President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia really knows how to run an election.
On May 26th, Mr Ben Ali's "first popular referendum in the history of Tunisia" was approved by 99.52 per cent of voters; results which the interior minister, Mr Hedi M'Henni, straight-facedly said "surprise only those who do not know Tunisia".
Mr Ben Ali has gone through the motions of having himself re-elected every five years since 1989, after overthrowing the late Habib Bourguiba in a bloodless coup in 1987. The former interior minister's score never dips below 99 per cent; only the decimal points vary.
Sunday's poll made the French and US-trained north African dictator de facto President for Life. Mr Ben Ali's present term will expire in 2004. But he has changed the 1958 constitution to allow himself to stand an unlimited number of times.
A handful of opposition figures denounced his "constitutional coup d'etat", which also grants the president lifelong legal impunity and gives him, rather than his rubber stamp assembly, the power to initiate most legislation.
Henceforward, Mr Ben Ali will personally preside over the magistrates' council, 99 per cent of whose members he will designate.
When the Tunisian interior ministry claims that 95 per cent of registered voters participated in the poll, they may not be far off the mark.
"The voter registration card is a talisman that you have to produce for everything in Tunisia," the journalist and human rights activist Ms Sihem ben Sedrine explained to Libération. "To obtain state-subsidised housing, welfare payments, medical care, food . . . you have to show it to get a passport, a job promotion or building permit . . . And if someone oversleeps on election day, civil servants go and fetch him."
To make sure there's no misunderstanding, the "yes" ballot is white; the "no" ballot, black. Staff in polling stations often ask to see the unused ballot before the voter leaves.
Dr Moncef Marzouki, a Tunisian human rights activist who teaches medicine in Paris, says he intends to file a complaint with the United Nations for "confiscation of the sovereignty of the Tunisian people through a rigged election". He deplores the absence of legal, peaceful means of overthrowing dictators. "The implied message (from the international community) is clear," he says. "If you want to get rid of your dictatorship, do what everyone else does. Go into the streets, let yourselves be chopped into minced meat by the machine guns . . . If you pull it off, we'll be happy for you. If you don't manage it, we'll have to continue working with your dictator, about whom we have no illusions anyway."
In neighbouring Algeria, people have understood that revolt offers the only hope of change, Ms Ghania Mouffok writes in Le Nouvel Observateur. Her country has festered in semi-civil war for the past decade. Twelve elections in 11 years have not stemmed violence that has claimed perhaps 150,000 lives.
The ambush in which 21 Algerian soldiers were killed in April, and a massacre of 31 civilians this month, were attributed to Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-three inmates died in a recent riot in Algiers's infamous Serkadji prison. "In Algeria, rioting has become the most popular way of defending yourself against the brutality of the regime," Ms Mouffok says.
In recent months, Algerians have rioted over the housing shortage and water cuts. The US construction group Bechtel sparked riots in the Sahara desert towns of El-Golea and In Salah when it tried to employ labourers from the north there; with unemployment around 30 per cent, it's not surprising.
In the western town of Ain Fekroun, riots broke out because doctors refused to care for a young man injured at a football match without payment, forcing the government to reverse plans to privatise medical care. The authorities are so terrified of a general uprising that all demonstrations are banned, even traditional marches of solidarity with the Palestinians.
Most dangerous for President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika and the generals who keep him in power, the region of Kabylie has been in a state of rebellion for the past 13 months, and is boycotting tomorrow's legislative elections. Foreign journalists have been banned from the area where more than 100 people were killed in rioting last year.
The result of the little parliamentary chess game played by Algerian generals is known in advance. The FLN, which was Algeria's only political party from independence in 1962 until the introduction of "democracy" at the end of the 1980s, is making a comeback. The RND, an FLN offshoot created to support the previous figurehead president in the last legislative elections five years ago, is waning.