NOMINATION. Nadir Larbaoui is a former diplomat, he previously held the position of chief of staff of the Presidency of the Republic
On Saturday, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has just appointed his third Prime Minister, since his election in December 2019, in the person of Nadir Larbaoui. This former chief of staff of the presidency since only March 2023, and who replaces Aïmene Benabderrahmane – in office since June 2021 – at the head of government, is a former diplomat, who notably served as permanent representative of Algeria to the UN in New York, and representative of Algeria to the League of Arab States. Nadir Larbaoui, a lawyer by training, has also held several senior positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Dry and methodical
The man, we will have understood, is more accustomed to the mysteries of diplomacy than to the meanders of the building with a thousand windows, the nickname of the seat of the prime minister in central Algiers, “but his organizational and firmness capacities have made him propelled to be appointed chief of staff of the presidency where he excelled in government coordination,” confides an official source. According to our sources, Larbaoui, as chief of staff of the presidency, was, since his appointment in March, not only responsible for “running the house”, to use the words of our source, but also “for sticking to the maximum close to the activities of the Benabderrahmane government. “Dissatisfied with certain poor performances by his Prime Minister, the president called on the ministers to contact him directly through his chief of staff [Larbaoui, Editor’s note] to advance their file,” maintains the same source.
Dry and methodical, a man of files, very detached from the Algerian political microcosm of the high spheres, Nadir Larbaoui “carried out his missions without qualms, while being very attentive to all the other state and diplomatic actors in Algiers”, asserts a senior state executive.
Tebboune exasperated
“It is no secret that President Tebboune was not very enchanted by his now ex-Prime Minister,” it is said. Last February, an atypical dispatch from the official APS press agency set the tone. Entitled “President Tebboune raises his voice”, the curious dispatch reported that Abdelmadjid Tebboune was exasperated by “bureaucracy”, the “culture of passivity”: “Very “elastic” deadlines, “approximate” figures, decisions which “disrupt” the daily lives of citizens and that of economic operators, have shaken the president off his hinges,” wrote the APS, inspired by the presidential palace of El Mouradia. “The hesitations over economic choices, the excessively long deadlines for drafting a law or its implementing texts, the piling up files… All this has long irritated the president. The former Prime Minister is an excellent public servant, but he had to err on the side of caution. He is a senior finance executive who was unable to become a politician, despite his competence and goodwill,” analyzes a connoisseur of the mysteries of the system.
These procrastination and other delays in the government program pushed President Tebboune to launch a first warning shot at the end of September. A presidential decree reorganized the organization chart of the Presidency of the Republic, endowing the director of the cabinet, Nadir Larbaoui at the time, with greater prerogatives, in particular, to monitor and evaluate the action of the government.
“The appointment of Larbaoui stems from a very simple observation made by the president: since his Prime Minister Abdelaziz Djerrad, Tebboune feels that the prime minister has his own work agenda, his own rhythm, which does not correspond to the expectations of the palace of El Mouradia. There, it is a question of definitively anchoring the palace of Doctor-Saâdane [seat of the prime minister] to that of El Mouradia,” analyzes an observer.
The economy first
This appointment – which, for the moment, does not lead to a government reshuffle, at least in the short term – comes almost a year from the date of the next presidential election in December 2024. The Larbaoui government is especially expected on the economic aspect, in particular the restoration of trust in the entrepreneurial sphere which remains hostage to bureaucracy and all-round blockages. As chief of staff, Larbaoui’s new prerogatives since the end of September also included the monitoring, processing, and analysis of “requests from investors, economic operators, and other special requests”.
It remains to find a diplomatic gentleman at the El Mouradia palace, in the absence of an official diplomatic advisor, a role that the former diplomat Larbaoui played with Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
As chief of staff of the Presidency of the Republic, Larbaoui was replaced by Boualem Boualem, advisor for legal and judicial affairs, responsible for relations with institutions and investigations and authorizations.
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