Following the youth riots of October 1988, Algeria experienced the first serious democratic opening in the region, 20 years before the revolutions of Egypt and Tunisia. Political parties, such as the communist Parti de l'Avant-Garde Socialiste (PAGS, Party of Avant-Garde Socialism), which had been clandestine, entered the public domain. And many new parties were created, including the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut (FIS, Islamic Salvation Front), which won the first round of the legislative elections that were then suspended by the military coup in January 1992, thus ending the new-found experience of democracy.

This chapter tracks the multiple issues at stake in Algeria during this brief period (1988–1992): democratization, the collapse of communism, the emergence of Islamism and the descent into a civil war in which the communists were among the first targets of assassinations. Examining the history of the PAGS during this period allows us to understand the ongoing divide in Algeria between Islamists and secularists on the one hand and – among the non-Islamists – between those who, in the name of democracy, considered all Islamists to be the arch enemy, to be eradicated at all costs, and those who, again in the name of democracy, did not.

Between October 1988 and September 1989, Algeria underwent dramatic political reform: it went from being a single-party regime – led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) – to a multiparty system planning the first free elections since the country's independence from France in 1962. As such, 23 years before the ‘Arab Spring’, Algeria was in sync with the political evolution of the African continent: by 1994 more than 30 sub-Saharan African countries had undergone some level of regime change, and none of them still overtly called themselves ‘single party regimes’ (Bratton and Walle, 1997: 8).

As in many sub-Saharan African countries, such changes carried the risk of political violence. By the end of 1992 elections had been suspended in Algeria, the main opposition party – the FIS, legalized in 1989 – had been disbanded, President Mohammed Boudiaf had been assassinated and the perspective of the war that would engulf the country for the decade to come was becoming a reality.