PRESIDENT Liamine Zeroual - yesterday completed a tragedy in three acts, writes Lara Marlowe. The first act was his own presidential election in November 1995, followed a year later by a constitutional referendum, to ensure that an as yet unelected assembly could never challenge Mr Zeroual's power. This electoral drama culminated with yesterday's parliamentary vote.
If it weren't for the 100,000 people who have been killed in the past 5 1/2 years of civil war, the attempts of the Algerian military backed regime to convince the world that it is moving towards democracy might be little more than a farce. The party which won last time, the now banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was not allowed to participate.
The drama has been played out against a backdrop of unrelenting violence. Two election observers were seriously wounded when their car exploded in a central Algerian town yesterday.
The results of the poll will be announced today but no one in Algeria doubted that Mr Zeroual's National Democratic Rally (RND), established less than four months ago for this very purpose, would take the lion's share of 380 seats in the new rubberstamp National Assembly.
It was also a safe guess that the interior ministry would announce a high turnout; in last November's referendum the government claimed 80 per cent of the population voted, although many polling stations remained virtually empty throughout the day. This time the high official turnout rate may even be real: without the stamp on their registration cards, Algerians fear harassment by the administration.
To strengthen Algeria's new "democratic credentials", the tame Islamists of Sheikh Mafoud Nahnah's Movement for a Peaceful Society (MSP) were expected to come in second after Mr Zeroual's party. The MSP used to be called Hamas (though unrelated to the Palestinian group of the same name), but to comply with the new constitution, which bans parties based on religion, Hamas abandoned its old Islamist name.
Above all, the poll was designed to make the world forget the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991, when the FIS won 55 per cent of the votes cast. The army deposed then President Chadli Benjedid, cancelled the election and outlawed the FIS, and civil war began.
The FIS's armed wing, the Islamic Salvation Army, along with the even more extreme Armed Islamic Group (GIA), terrorise the country with an undiscriminating ferocity reciprocated by the Algerian armed forces.