Algeria's Abdelmadjid Tebboune re-elected as President with 94.7% votes

Algiers: Algeria's 78-year-old incumbent President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has been re-elected to the position with 94.7% of the votes, Al Jazeera reported, quoting the country's electoral authority.

Algeria's National Independent Authority for Elections (ANIE) head Mohamed Charfi said on Sunday that the independent candidate Tebboune won sweeping majority in the polls held on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.

"Of 5,630,000 voters recorded, 5,320,000 voted for the independent candidate Abdelmadjid Tebboune, accounting for 94.65 percent" of the votes, Al Jazeera quoted Charfi as saying.

Army-backed Tebboune's challengers included conservative Abdelaali Hassani Cherif of Movement of Society for Peace (MSP) party, who won 3 percent of the ballots, and socialist Youcef Aouchiche Socialist Forces Front (FFS) party, who won 2.1 percent.

Hassani Cherif's campaign alleged that the polling staff were pressured to inflate results and alleged failures in delivering vote-sorting records to candidates' representatives, and alleged instances of proxy group voting. It did not say whether it believed the violations had affected the result, Al Jazeera reported.

ANIE head Charfi said while announcing the results that the team tried to ensure transparency and fair competition among all candidates.

Earlier in the day, ANIE announced an "average turnout" rate of 48 per cent, calling it "provisional", but it did not give a breakdown of the number of voters against those initially registered.

Tebboune's re-election implies that Algeria will likely continue with a governing programme that has resumed lavish social spending based on increased energy revenues after he came into office in 2019 following a period of lower oil prices.

Algeria formally applied to join the BRICS group and submitted a request to become a shareholder member of the BRICS Bank on July 22 last year.

"We officially applied to join the BRICS group, we sent a letter asking to be shareholder members in the bank ... Algeria's first contribution in the bank will be USD 1.5 billion," An-Nahar Al-Jadid, Algerian daily, quoted Tebboune as saying.