81-year-old Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika to fifth term

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 81, will be the candidate of the National Liberation Front (NLF), his party, in the presidential election scheduled for April 2019.

The Algerian head of state, reduced by the consequences of a stroke in 2013, is chosen by his party for a fifth term. To date Bouteflika has still not expressed himself on this subject, any more than his entourage.

In power since 1999, the Algerian president appears less and less in public. Head of State since 1999 and holder of the record of longevity at the head of Algeria, Bouteflika makes only rare appearances, on a wheelchair, and no longer speaks in public since his stroke.

In April 2014, Bouteflika was re-elected for a fourth term, almost one year after the stroke, for which he had been hospitalized for three months in Paris. He had ended the interminable on his application only two months before the poll and ten days before the closure of the files.

Many observers, Algerians and foreigners, are confident that he will be the candidate again in 2019.