ELECTIONS IN Algeria tomorrow represent the third step in the regime's planned return to a constitutional state. The last legislative polls in January 1992 were cancelled when the Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was on the point of winning.
Tomorrow's elections follow a presidential poll in 1995, and a subsequent constitutional referendum which gave extensive power to the presidency, overshadowing parliament.
This political reformation is taking place against the background of daily killings, bomb blasts, the flight into exile of thousands of people, a hidden war between competing Islamic groups, and against local militias armed by the government and the security forces. Despite this atmosphere of terror, 39 political parties, almost all by-products of the old National Liberation Front (FLN), are putting up 7,486 candidates in the elections which will produce 380 members of a lower house of parliament.
The party not standing is the 1992 winner, the FIS. It is banned and its three top leaders have been in prison virtually incommunicado for more then five years. One of them, 42-year-old Mr Abdelkader Hachani, who won a seat in 1992, is on hunger strike and his health has seriously deteriorated, according to his lawyer.
The FIS leadership in exile has called on its supporters to boycott this week's polls. The government strategy, however, is to get a big turnout and thus demonstrate that the FIS has had its day. Algeria has a long tradition of 90 per cent or more turnouts in elections.
An alternative Islamic party has been encouraged by the regime in recent years. This is Society's Movement for Peace (MSP, formerly known as Ham as), led by Mr Mahfoud Nahnah. His party has a substantial organisation, a big middle-class constituency, and a women's organisation.
Mr Nahnah has forecast that his party could get as much as 50 per cent of the vote.
The front-runner among the parties is the National Democratic Assembly (RND), newly created by President Lamine Zeroual, and with a clutch of ministers among its candidates. Alongside it is the old party of the establishment, the FLN, the sole party for 25 years. The FLN is likely to be both the beneficiary of the FLN's heroic reputation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the loser from its degraded days under President Chadli Benjedid in the 1980s.
The Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), which now has a national following, is led from exile by a veteran politician of the pre-independence days, Mr Hocine Ait Ahmed. The Cultural Assembly for Democracy (RCD) is small, totally based in one region, and tacitly encouraged by the regime to undermine the FFS.
With Mr Lousia Hanoune's tiny trotskyist Workers' Party (PT), the FFS is the only party opposing the regime on the critical point of dialogue with the FIS. The two have consistently defied the government and been part of several attempts at negotiation made in Italy and Spain.
The two issues which most Algerians say they want addressed by their leaders have been barely touched on in the campaign. First comes the issue of security. Who has a strategy to end the violence? Second come economic questions. Despite Algeria's good macro-economic profile, thanks to oil and gas prices, standards of living for ordinary people are low and unemployment is chronic.