Polls have opened in Algeria where incumbent President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is seeking a fourth term in office.<\/p>\n
The 77-year-old leader has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke last year and has not campaigned personally ahead of the election.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouteflika, who is favourite to win, is facing five other candidates.<\/p>\n
Opposition parties have held protest marches and called for a boycott, describing the election as a sham.<\/p>\n
They say Mr Bouteflika is unfit to run because of his health problems.<\/p>\n
Three other presidential candidates pulled out of the race soon after Mr Bouteflika’s candidacy was announced, saying the result was now a foregone conclusion.<\/p>\n
His re-election bid has spawned a protest movement called Barakat, meaning “Enough”, which have been holding demonstrations around the country.<\/p>\n
Police violently broke up a protest organised by the group in the capital, Algiers, on Tuesday and arrested some of its members, the AFP news agency reports.<\/p>\n
More than 260,000 police have been deployed to protect 50,000 polling booths, it reports.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouteflika’s main challenger, Ali Benflis, said he would not tolerate any attempt to rig the election in favour of the president.<\/p>\n
“In case there is fraud I will not shut up. This does not mean we will push for chaos, because we have opted for stability,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouteflika took office in 1999 when Algeria was still caught up in a civil war between the military and Islamist militants and has been credited by supporters for curbing the conflict and restoring some economic stability.<\/p>\n
He scrapped constitutional rules in 2008 limiting him to two terms in office.<\/p>\n
Mr Bouteflika won elections the following year with 90% of the vote.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Polls have opened in Algeria where incumbent President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is seeking a fourth term in office. The 77-year-old leader has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke last year and has not campaigned personally ahead of the election. Mr Bouteflika, who is favourite to win, is facing five other candidates. Opposition parties have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":14005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-14003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}