ALGIERS, 11 April 2004 — The sunny April sky that graced election day 2004 in Algeria matched the voters’ buoyant mood as they took part in polls that were unlike any others the north African country had seen in the four decades since independence.

“It’s the first time we’ve had the freedom to express our will,” an elderly voter enthused. “It’s the first time the opposition is really expressing itself.”

That was Thursday.

On Friday, dark, rain-laden clouds shrouded the capital Algiers, further dampening the spirits of those who had reveled in a wide-open “American-style” race but were disappointed — if not stunned — by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s landslide re-election victory. Candidates, pundits and ordinary people were flabbergasted.

“I feel sick,” a waiter said in response to the incumbent’s 83 percent score against five challengers, none of whom made double digits. “It’s a dictatorship!”

Bouteflika’s archrival Ali Benflis, the runner-up with 7.9 percent, fiercely rejected the result, saying North Korean strongman Kim Il Sung “couldn’t have done better.”

Another also-ran, Siad Sadi, who was credited with just 1.93 percent of the vote for fourth place, called the announced results “grotesque.”

“No one expected such a crushing victory,” said Ahmed Fattani, publisher of the daily L’Expression, likening the shock result to deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s near unanimous re-election shortly before his ouster in 2003.

Mohamed Benchicou, publisher of the respected Le Matin daily and an ardent Bouteflika critic, called it an “electoral parody.”

But mystified observers who expected a closer race were uncomfortable with fraud allegations, given the thumping score for Bouteflika, and turned instead to 20-20 hindsight revolving around the candidates’ records, campaign strategies and charisma.

Most people — even those who preferred other candidates — acknowledged Bouteflika’s efforts to end the civil war, notably his “civil reconciliation” plan that was overwhelmingly endorsed in a September 1999 referendum, just five months after he came to power.

Thousands of Islamic militants lay down their arms under a partial amnesty, leading to a sharp decrease in violence that had claimed more than 100,000 lives since 1992.

The president savvily centered his campaign on this achievement, sidelining concerns over chronic social problems including rampant unemployment, poverty and severe housing and water shortages, as well as an ongoing crisis in impoverished Kabylie, the homeland of Algeria’s sizeable Berber minority.

The fact that people, especially women, feel immeasurably safer venturing outside their homes is the change that most voters cited first when they said Bouteflika deserved a second term, and was also the factor that analysts pointed to most frequently as a boon for the president’s re-election campaign.

Bouteflika has also cultivated an international stature that none of his challengers could hope to match, coupled with a gift for oratory. He comes up with classical rhetoric and earthy proverbs with equal ease in both French and Arabic, and has broad appeal on both sides of Algeria’s religious-secular divide, as well as among different social strata.

The uncharismatic and untested Benflis, by contrast, had to accept coaching to liven up his campaign speeches.

“People are not politicized,” Larbi Mouassa, a Benflis activist, told AFP. “If they (candidates) can’t make enough noise, people won’t vote for them.”

An 81-year-old Berber woman in Algiers said she had voted for Bouteflika because he was “nice”, regardless of the situation in her native Kabylie, where the president has been widely faulted for his handling of a three-year-old crisis.

Benflis also appears to have committed a tactical error in promising to address the problems of Kabylie as a top priority if elected, “pitching my tent there” if necessary.

“You can’t solve problems like that by waving a magic wand,” said L’Expression’s Fattani.