Oil Barrel Falls Below 60 Dollars!… Economic and Social Chaos in Algeria Is Now Inevitable!
BLACK DAY FOR THE ALGERIAN ECONOMY!… The price of a barrel of oil fell, this Tuesday, December 16, below the symbolic threshold of 60 dollars, plunging the Algerian economy, already fragile, into the abyss. A drop that sounds like a clinical death for the military junta in power in Algiers, whose political and financial survival depends almost exclusively on oil rent.
At under 60 dollars for several hours now, the decline could continue toward less than 50 dollars, or even less than 40 dollars. With OPEC+ having decided to loosen the taps, at a time when demand is slowing due to a weakening of global growth, producing countries find themselves exposed to prolonged instability. But among them, Algeria stands on the front line of the announced victims.
Algeria, an economy on its knees,… governance in collapse:
In Algiers, the official silence is deafening. Because behind the façade propaganda and slogans of self-sufficiency, the reality is relentless: the Algerian economy is entirely dependent on hydrocarbons, which account for more than 96 percent of export revenues and around 98 percent of the state budget. With a barrel below 60 dollars, this rent-based, archaic, corrupt and sclerotic model simply no longer holds.
For several years, the military regime has preferred to consolidate its security grip and repress any dissenting voice, rather than undertake the structural reforms necessary to diversify the economy. The result: no industrial fabric worthy of the name, no competitive private sector, no sustainable foreign investment, and a youth condemned to unemployment or exile.
The military junta with its back to the wall:
Foreign currency reserves are melting away at a visible pace, and massive subsidies are becoming untenable. Social tensions set to explode in working-class neighborhoods, where the cost of living is soaring while the dinar, described as “a monkey currency,” collapses, should end up toppling the Algeria of the “Generals”.
The military junta, incapable of proposing an economic vision, clings to power without democratic legitimacy and multiplies arbitrary arrests, political trials and disinformation campaigns. It points to foreigners; Morocco, France, the United Arab Emirates or even Israel, as scapegoats, in a paranoid headlong rush that no longer fools anyone.
The time of reckoning has come:
The oil mirage has faded, giving way to a brutal reality: Algeria can no longer live beyond its means by drawing on a dwindling rent. The Algerian people continue to pay the price of a fossilized military-political system.
Now, if the barrel were to fall durably below 50 dollars,… then the entire “house of cards” that is Algeria could collapse brutally, dragging the Algerian population into indescribable poverty and misery.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv
