Algeria’s Populist Politics Matches Ramadan Prayers and Free Meals : North Africa: Islamic leaders try to woo the poor in hopes of winning the first multi-party national elections.

KOUBA, Algeria —  At dusk on a recent day in the holy month of Ramadan, 200 hungry men lined up outside city hall in this hillside suburb of Algiers for a free meal offered by the town’s Islamic government.

During Ramadan, Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset. But many of the men standing outside the colonial-era city hall looked as if they hadn’t eaten for much longer than that.

Inside the municipal building auditorium, long tables had been set with servings of dates, olives, salad, mutton soup and French bread. As they filtered in, the men separated themselves into two groups. One group, mostly bearded and wearing traditional floor-length djellabah robes, lined up to pray before eating. The other, mainly men clad in dusty jeans and work clothes, ignored the prayers and went straight for the food.

Soon, the lyrical chants of prayer were intermingled with the sounds of eating and clanging dinnerware.

No matter. Officials with the Islamic Salvation Front political party looked on at the feasting men and the praying men with equal satisfaction. Similar meals, they knew, were being served at city halls all over Algeria, where the fundamentalist party gained power in municipal elections last June.

This was populist politics, Islamic style. The diners, pious or not, were potential voters. And with Algeria’s first-ever multi-party national elections only months away, the free meals offered every night of Ramadan were an attempt by the fundamentalists to broaden their political base among the country’s vast population of poor and unemployed. Nearly two-thirds of Algeria’s population of 26 million is under 25 years old. Unemployment is conservatively estimated to be above 25%.

“This is the first time a Ramadan meal has been offered at city hall,” boasted Dr. Tchikou Toufik, 34, a physician and one of 12 Islamic Front representatives on the 15-seat Kouba City Council. “Last year, there was nothing. But last year, it was the FLN that was in charge.”

The FLN, the French acronym for National Liberation Front, is the party that ruled Algeria without interruption from 1962 until last June’s municipal elections. But since June, Algeria has been governed at the local level by the fundamentalists and at the national level by the secular, socialist FLN, created from the ranks of rebels in the Algerian war of independence from France.

To mark the difference, the city government in Kouba covered up the old National Front revolutionary slogan--”For the People, By the People”--on the front of city hall with a new plastic sign proclaiming the town of 86,000 inhabitants “An Islamic Community of the Region.”

Similar moves in other cities resulted in formal legal complaints from the national party government, which claimed that they violate Algeria’s secular constitution.

At best, it has been an uneasy cohabitation. The fundamentalists were swept into local offices on a wave of popular discontent with the inefficient government and moribund economy administered by the National Front. Now they are hoping to ride the same wave into power on the national level in elections expected to be held sometime this summer, possibly as early as June.

The vote will be closely watched by leaders in Muslim countries around the world. “The Algerian elections are very, very important,” said a diplomat in neighboring Tunisia, where the main fundamentalist party is banned. “The Algerian municipal elections last year gave the fundamentalists here a real shot in the arm. Everyone is watching to see what will happen at the national level.”

If successful, the Algerian Islamic Front would be the first Muslim fundamentalist party in the Arab world to win control of a national government through freely contested elections. The victory could strengthen the push for power by strong Islamic parties in Egypt and Jordan, as well as other Arab states.

Political experts and diplomats also see the Algerian elections as an important measure of shifting Arab political sympathies in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. The elections are of particular interest in France and southern Europe, where many fear a fundamentalist victory could lead to new waves of immigration to the north.

“If I were a political science graduate student looking for a dissertation topic, this is the one I would choose,” said a Western diplomat based here.

At its heart, the upcoming election pits the creaking, widely discredited National Front government, abandoned by its Soviet sponsors and crippled by many of the same state-economy maladies as its East European models, against a largely unfocused, decentralized, populist Muslim movement almost sure to divide into factions if it were able to gain power. On the flanks of this main battle are at least 30 other political parties, ranging from two large Berber parties to Trotskyites.

An Islamic Front victory is by no means certain. Since sweeping municipal elections last June, the fundamentalists have managed to alienate many Algerians with their preachy righteousness.

Residents of Algiers, for example, were outraged recently when religious militants attacked a crowd at a popular Ramadan concert. The March 22 concert at a suburban sports hall was a performance of traditional chaabi music--a blend of poetry and song.

Several hundred fundamentalist militants first attempted to block entrances, accusing concert-goers of sacrilege for seeking entertainment during Ramadan. Then they reportedly attacked people inside the Harcha Auditorium, east of Algiers, with stones and Molotov cocktails. According to police, who fought the anti-concert demonstrators with tear gas, 14 people were injured in the incident.

After 2,000 militant fundamentalists showed up to block another concert on March 24--this time by Ait Menguellet, a revered war of independence hero-poet--several Algerian newspapers came out with stories attacking the “intolerance” of fundamentalists.

El Watan is one of the dozens of newspapers created since broad press and political reforms were initiated by President Chadli Bendjedid in 1989. In a fierce, front-page editorial, El Watan columnist Tayeb Belghiche accused the bearded militants of “wanting to kill our country’s already impoverished culture.”

“What a paradox,” Belghiche said about the March 24 concert. “Ait Menguellet fought for freedom of expression and was jailed (by French colonialists). Now those who have this liberty want to sweep it away.”

The fundamentalists were also hurt by inconsistency during the Gulf War, during which they started out by condemning Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as an atheist invader and ended up praising him as a Muslim hero.

At one point in the Muslim-hero phase, Islamic Front leaders said they had enlisted 800 volunteers to fight alongside the Iraqi army. But Algerian Foreign Minister Sid Ahmed Ghozali said the volunteers never got any farther than Amman, Jordan.

In Algeria, and the other countries in the North African Maghreb, street sentiment ran heavily in favor of Iraq. The ocher-colored walls of an old French seminary and church in Kouda remain covered with pro-Iraq graffiti, including paintings of Iraqi flags and Scud missiles.

The fundamentalist party’s early hesitation to endorse the Iraqi leader fueled widespread rumors that the Islamic Front received secret funding from Saudi Arabia and was reluctant to attack its secret patron. The fundamentalists deny the allegation.

But a senior official in the national government asserted: “The (fundamentalist party) was very maladroit in the way it handled the war. . . . They lost a lot of credibility.”

Meanwhile, the suddenly pluralistic Algerian political scene is crowded with dozens of new political parties appealing to a wide range of interests that did not participate in the local elections last year.

They include two important parties, the Socialist Forces Front and the Assembly for a Constitutional Democracy, representing Algeria’s minority Berber population; the Movement for Democratic Reform party, formed by former Algerian leader Ahmed Ben Bella and powerful in western Algeria, and several new militant Islamic parties that claim to be more fundamentalist than the Islamic Front.

In opening the democratic floodgates, President Bendjedid is hoping that voters will turn back to the National Front as the ship of experience in the sea of uncertainty presented by the multitude of other parties.

At the local level, the Islamic governments have been able to rekindle a sense of civic pride that had declined under the old system. Fundamentalist party members have occasionally gathered for patrols to pick up garbage. In Kouba, families have volunteered to take turns providing and serving Ramadan meals.

In another gesture to woo voters, the fundamentalists also have opened “Islamic markets” in Algiers. Consumption of food increases during Ramadan, mainly because families compensate for their daylight deprivation with nighttime feasts. Grocers exploit this by increasing prices. The “Islamic markets,” subsidized by the Islamic Front, are aimed at winning friends by offering produce at pre-Ramadan prices.

Despite their holiday gesture and their sparking of some volunteerism, opponents claim that the Islamic Front’s efforts have not improved day-to-day services; power outages are still frequent, while garbage pickup is infrequent. And national party leaders contend that the year of Islamic Front government at city halls has been a blessing in disguise.

“The experience has shown that there is no miracle solution to the problems of our country,” Abdel Hamid Mehri, National Front secretary general, said in an interview at the party’s headquarters.

To give their party’s comeback a helping hand, National Front lawmakers in the People’s National Assembly have been busy in recent days rewriting the country’s election code.

Included in the “reforms” are a redrawing of election districts to weaken Islamic Front strongholds, a doubling of the number of members in the National Assembly and changes in the country’s proxy voting system that will limit men from casting votes for wives and daughters--a practice credited with greatly helping the fundamentalists in their victory last year. Under the former system, some men were able to cast four ballots, including one for themselves. Under the new system, they will be limited to two, including their own.

Meanwhile, opposition and pro-government newspapers print stories and political cartoons almost daily criticizing the fundamentalist behavior at city hall.

Islamic Front leader Abbassi Madani, a short, soft-spoken man who wears a djellabah robe and white skullcap, attacks the efforts as a smear campaign, saying the election reforms seem “designed especially to limit the success” of his party.