Opinion | The People Who Won’t Be Duped

Older Algerians, for their part, have not forgotten the country’s own spring at the end of the 1980s. The authorities of the day, after first ordering the army to shoot at another generation of youth — this one very angry — later agreed to a transition of sorts, notably allowing the advent of multiparty politics, the army’s withdrawal from civilian politics and greater freedom for the media. But however exhilarating this step toward democracy was for Algerian society at the time, it was doomed from the start.

That transition was directed — manipulated — by the authorities, without any participation from the opposition or civil society. In a bid to ensure their own survival, the authorities let the Islamists loose to scare the people. The gambit worked, but at the cost of a gruesome civil war. Algerians today do not want to repeat these mistakes.

They do not want to see installed in the presidential palace in a few months a younger and more modern clone of Mr. Bouteflika. And they do not want the current authorities to hold the ship’s wheel through any transition.

Algerians today want to invent something, and that can forestall any outside interference of the kind that the West or Persian Gulf countries exerted in Libya and Syria. They want a transition that will give time to time — and, more than anything, that isn’t fixed from the get-go. For them, the solution isn’t holding elections, legislative or presidential, any time soon. Protesters in Algeria want radical reform.

The goal isn’t tabula rasa but a thorough, structural remelting brought about in a transition overseen by consensual figures — lawyers, academics, representatives from civil society. The point is to cleanse the political field and make it more pluralistic. A transitional government could well manage many of the day-to-day matters of state while a constituent assembly is set up, or a referendum is organized, to let Algerians determine for themselves what their priorities are. The powers-that-be today would have to partake in any such transition, but they should not get to control its outcome.

So General Gaïd Salah finally has turned his back on Mr. Bouteflika. Many officials who until very recently were still prostrating themselves before the presidential portrait are now following suit. But Algerians are watching this scene with a mocking eye, knowing that the play hardly is over. They will not be duped.

And they know what they want. They want Algeria’s real leaders — the army and the security forces — to finally accept consequential change and give up their monopoly over any political decision-making in Algeria.

Akram Belkaïd is a member of Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial team.

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