Ailing Bouteflika Urges Algerians to Shun Boycott Call, Eyes Fourth Term

Algerians are weighing their options for Thursday's presidential election, with ailing Abdelaziz Bouteflika urging a large turnout as he seeks a fourth term amid boycott demands and warnings of fraud.

More than 260,000 police have deployed to guarantee security in the 50,000 polling booths set up to accommodate the 23 million Algerians eligible to vote in the race being contested by six candidates.

The 77-year-old incumbent, who appears frail and barely audible on the rare occasions he is shown on state television, is widely expected to win another five-year term.

But he faces the damaging possibility of a low turnout, with youth activists and opposition parties calling on Algerians to snub the poll, and many questioning whether he is fit to rule.

Police violently dispersed a demonstration in Algiers on Wednesday against Bouteflika's bid for re-election and arrested a number of protesters, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

The gathering was organised by youth protest group Barakat (Enough), which was founded just two months ago specifically to call for a change of leadership.

Bouteflika on Tuesday urged "all citizens to participate in the presidential election", saying in a message carried by national media that those who abstained were choosing to "remain on the fringes of the nation".

The president has not been seen in public since May 2012 and suffered a mini-stroke last year which confined him to a hospital in France for three months and prevented him from taking to the campaign trail, leaving that task to a team of loyalists.

His team announced on Wednesday that he would vote in person at a polling station in Algiers, after some local media doubted his ability to do so, or to swear the oath of office as the constitution requires.

Interior Minister Tayeb Belaiz insisted that "all the conditions of transparency, neutrality and security have been put in place for the success of this election".

But a coalition of opposition parties, including the Islamist Movement for the Society of Peace (MSP) and the secular Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), have called on voters to shun the election, calling it a "sham".

Participation is set to be a key issue on Thursday.

Officially 74.11 percent of the electorate voted in the 2009 presidential poll, which Bouteflika won by a landslide after changing the constitution to allow himself to stand for more than two terms.

But a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable estimated the 2009 turnout at between 25 and 30 percent.

A number of rallies were disrupted in the last week of the election campaign, some by Berber protesters in the traditionally restive Kabylie region backing calls for a boycott.

On Tuesday, thousands responded to the RCD's call for a protest march in Tizi Ouzou, the Kabylie capital, demanding the promotion of the Berber language Tamazight, denouncing an "election masquerade" and insulting the country's rulers.

The president's main rival, Ali Benflis, repeatedly warned of fraud during campaigning, describing it as his "main adversary" in Thursday's vote.

The former prime minister ran against Bouteflika in 2004 but lost heavily, alleging that his adversary's landslide victory then was rigged.

Benflis's repeated comments about the likelihood of electoral fraud this time have drawn angry comments from the largely absent president.

Without naming him, Bouteflika accused his rival of inciting violence, sedition and even "terrorism via the television", in meetings with visiting dignitaries.

The hostile war of words between the election front-runners has dominated the run-up to polling day, with Benflis saying on Tuesday that fraud was "immoral and degrading, and dishonors all those who resort to it".

He warned he would "not keep quiet" if the election is rigged, and said he had an "army" of people in place to monitor the poll "consisting of 60,000 people, most of them young men and women armed to the teeth with conviction".

Bouteflika's supporters have emphasized his role in ending Algeria's "black decade" of civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.