Urgent Action Needed to Free Lyes Touati: Algeria's Regime Jails Socialists to Silence the Hirak Revival
Regime Uses Fake Separatism to Crush the Socialist Left
The arrest of PST leader Lyes Touati marks a turning point in North African repression. Internationally, socialists must respond with more than statements: we need lasting networks of solidarity across the Maghreb.
On December 14, 2025, while Ferhat Mehenni proclaimed the ‘Federal Republic of Kabylia’ to a room of pro-Israel activists near the Arc de Triomphe, Algerian security services arrested Lyes Touati in a café in the coastal town of Aokas. The timing was not coincidental. It was choreographed.
Touati is a leading member of the Parti Socialiste des Travailleurs (PST), the Algerian Trotskyist party. He was elected to the party’s Central Committee at its April 2021 congress. The list of delegates was formally transmitted to the Ministry of Interior the following day. The regime knows exactly who he is. That is why they arrested him.
The charge? ‘Sympathy for the MAK’: the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia, which the Algerian state has classified as a terrorist organisation since 2021. The accusation is, as the PST statement puts it, ‘a joke in bad taste that makes you smile’. No, worse than a joke: it is a calculated insult to a lifetime of socialist organising. Lyes Touati is a Trotskyist internationalist. The MAK is openly pro-Israel, funded by Morocco, and led by figures who speak at conferences alongside Zionist activists. The political distance between them could not be greater. But the regime does not care about political coherence. It cares about eliminating opposition.
The Systematic Destruction of the Secular Left
Touati’s arrest is not an isolated incident. It is the latest move in a methodical campaign to liquidate the democratic opposition that emerged during the 2019 Hirak uprising.
Consider the pattern. In January 2022, the State Council ordered the ‘temporary’ suspension of the PST’s activities and sealed its headquarters. The pretext was a technicality about congress dates, a fabrication easily disproved by the bailiff’s receipt sitting in Interior Ministry files. The real reason was the PST’s role in the Forces of the Democratic Alternative (FDA), the secular coalition that boycotted the 2021 legislative elections. Those elections recorded the lowest turnout in Algerian history: 22.99 percent. The regime has never forgiven those who exposed its democratic bankruptcy.
The PST is not alone. The Democratic and Social Movement (MDS) was suspended in 2023. The Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH), the country’s oldest human rights organisation, was dissolved in 2022. Rassemblement Actions Jeunesse (RAJ), a key mobilising force in the Hirak, was dissolved in 2021. Radio M, the independent media outlet, was shuttered in 2023; its editor Ihsane El-Kadi was sentenced to seven years in prison. According to the National Committee for the Release of Prisoners, at least 225 prisoners of conscience languish in Algerian jails. Some are there for a Facebook comment. Others for a ‘like’. Touati himself was previously sentenced to six months in prison for posting a quotation from La Boétie: ‘They are only great because we are on our knees.’
Hogra. That is the word Algerians use for this. It means the contempt and humiliation the powerful visit upon ordinary people. It captures something that ‘repression’ does not: the sheer arrogance of a regime that jails people for quoting sixteenth-century philosophy.
The MAK Trap: Reactionary Separatism as Repressive Instrument
Why does the regime associate a Trotskyist militant with the MAK? Because the MAK provides the perfect trap. It allows the state to conflate three entirely distinct things: genuine Amazigh cultural demands, which have deep roots in Kabyle society; reactionary ethnic separatism, which the MAK represents; and secular socialist opposition, which threatens the regime’s class interests.
The MAK’s character is not ambiguous. Its leader, Ferhat Mehenni, has visited Jerusalem. He speaks openly of Kabylia as ‘the Israel of North Africa’. The movement has received documented funding from Morocco: 250,000 euros per month, according to a former senior member who broke with the organisation in 2011. The December 14 ‘independence declaration’ in Paris featured speeches from Israeli activists. French journalist Slimane Zeghidour describes the MAK as ‘openly anti-Arab, anti-Islamist, and pro-Israeli, including during the Gaza war’. Other observers go further, characterising it as fascist.
The PST’s position could not be clearer. Mahmoud Rechidi’s statement condemns the MAK for its ‘obvious links between Ferhat Mhenni and his MAK with the criminal Zionist entity, with the reactionary and dictatorial Moroccan and Emirati regimes, and with the imperialist powers’. This is not diplomatic hedging. It is principled opposition to a reactionary movement that cynically instrumentalises Amazigh identity for imperialist purposes.
But the regime benefits from the confusion. The ‘MAK trap’ achieves several objectives simultaneously. It isolates Kabyle activists from the broader Algerian population by portraying all expressions of Amazigh identity as separatist treason. It provides a legal framework, specifically Article 87 bis of the Penal Code, for detaining political opponents without evidence of actual criminal activity. And it allows the military-bureaucratic elite to present itself as the sole defender of national unity against an ‘external plot’ involving Israel and Morocco.
The timing of Touati’s arrest was precise. The MAK declaration provided the pretext. The PST’s actual politics were irrelevant. What mattered was creating an atmosphere of emergency in which any critic could be swept up as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’.
The PST’s Organisational Resilience
The PST has survived worse. Its roots extend to the Revolutionary Communist Group (GCR), founded in 1974 during the Boumédienne era. The transition to the PST came in 1989, during the brief democratic opening after the 1988 riots. Then came the ‘Black Decade’.
The Algerian civil war of the 1990s killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people. The PST navigated a precarious path between an authoritarian military state and a violent Islamist insurgency. Unlike other secular forces that aligned unconditionally with the military’s ‘eradicationist’ strategy, the PST maintained its focus on class struggle and democratic space. Many activists were murdered or forced into exile. The party survived. This historical resilience has equipped it with a cadre structure capable of maintaining organisational life even under the current suspension.
The Fourth International’s relationship with Algeria predates the PST itself. Michel Raptis, known as Pablo, served as an advisor to Ahmed Ben Bella after independence, helping formulate the March Decrees of 1963 that established autogestion (self-management) for abandoned colonial estates. This history matters. It demonstrates that revolutionary internationalism in Algeria is not an imported ideology but a tradition with deep local roots, one that has survived colonialism, civil war, and now the post-Hirak repression.
What the Hirak Revealed and What It Left Unresolved
The 2019 Hirak brought five million Algerians into the streets. It forced the resignation of Bouteflika. It recorded, in the slogans and songs that filled Friday demonstrations, a profound rejection of the entire system: système dégage. But it did not overthrow the regime.
Why? The question is not academic. It matters for every revolutionary organisation in the MENA region.
The Hirak was characterised by extraordinary creativity and mass participation. It was also characterised by organisational fragmentation and, crucially, by the absence of independent working-class political action. The Friday demonstrations continued for 54 weeks. But the movement never escalated to strike action that could have paralysed the economy and forced deeper concessions. The Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (UGTA), the main trade union federation, is a state-controlled apparatus, what the PST accurately describes as a ‘state agent in a state-capitalist system’. Independent labour organisation exists, but it proved too weak to give the Hirak an economic cutting edge.
The regime exploited COVID-19 to clear the streets in March 2020. When protests resumed in 2021, they were banned outright. The limited freedoms won in the 1990s and defended through the Bouteflika era are now being systematically rolled back. Military spending has doubled from $10 billion in 2022 to $25 billion in 2025. A June 2024 presidential decree allows serving military officers to take positions in the civil service and state-owned enterprises. The ‘Second Republic’ under Tebboune represents not reform but retrenchment: a revanchist form of state capitalism determined to prevent any recurrence of mass mobilisation.
Beyond Statements: Building Networks Across North Africa
The arrest of Lyes Touati has prompted solidarity statements from the Fourth International, the NPA in France, and human rights organisations. This is necessary but not sufficient.
The pattern of repression in Algeria is not unique. In Egypt, Sisi’s ‘Second Republic’ has pioneered many of the techniques now being deployed across North Africa: the weaponisation of counter-terrorism legislation, the dissolution of independent civil society, the imprisonment of activists for social media posts, the systematic decapitation of secular opposition while Islamist movements are alternately repressed and instrumentalised. Similar dynamics are visible in Tunisia, where the democratic gains of 2011 are being reversed under Saied. In Morocco, the monarchy maintains stability through a combination of selective co-optation and targeted repression of journalists, activists, and critics.
What is needed is not just solidarity with individual prisoners, though that remains essential. What is needed is the construction of durable networks that can connect progressive movements across the Maghreb and the broader MENA region.
The regimes understand this. Morocco and Algeria are rivals, but their security services share techniques and, when necessary, intelligence. The repressive apparatus is internationalised even when interstate relations are hostile. The left’s response must be equally coordinated.
The Fourth International has organisational presence in the region through sections like the PST, through sympathising organisations, and through decades of accumulated relationships. The MENA Solidarity Network, trade union internationals, and human rights organisations provide additional infrastructure. What is lacking is the political will to treat solidarity not as an occasional response to crises but as a permanent strategic orientation.
What Can Be Done
Immediately: demand the release of Lyes Touati and all political prisoners in Algeria. The PST’s lawyers have submitted a request for provisional release. International pressure can influence whether the investigating judge grants it. Write to Algerian embassies. Raise the case in trade unions and labour councils. Share the solidarity appeal through every available channel.
Demand the lifting of the suspension on the PST. The party held its congress; it submitted its documents; it complied with the law. The suspension is a political act, and it must be reversed through political pressure.
More broadly: build the relationships that will enable sustained solidarity. The Touati case should be a catalyst for establishing or strengthening connections with Algerian activists, with the PST’s international networks, with human rights monitors, and with progressive forces across North Africa. When the next arrest comes, and it will come, the response should be faster, louder, and more coordinated.
For Fourth Internationalists: The PST’s theoretical contribution to understanding Algeria deserves wider engagement. Its analysis of the Algerian state as a form of ‘state capitalism’, where a bureaucratic class owns the means of production and appropriates oil rents to maintain political hegemony, provides tools for understanding not just Algeria but similar formations across the Global South. The party’s Marxist-feminist work, exemplified by militants like ‘W.’ in Béjaïa, links the specific precariousness of women under Algerian capitalism to broader dynamics of class struggle. This is not abstract theory. It is strategic intelligence for building movements.
The Smile in Oued Ghir
Mahmoud Rechidi’s statement notes that despite his arbitrary imprisonment, Lyes Touati ‘has not lost his legendary smile’. That image is more than personal resilience. It represents a century of revolutionary socialist traditions that have survived colonialism, civil war, and neoliberal assault. The regime can imprison individuals. It cannot imprison the politics they represent.
Touati’s main concern, Rechidi reports, is for the dozens of other political prisoners languishing in Oued Ghir, many imprisoned for nothing more than a social media comment. His second concern is for his mother’s health and his family’s welfare; he was their primary support after his father’s death. These details humanise what might otherwise become abstract solidarity. Revolutionary politics is not only about programmes and perspectives. It is about people, their families, and the communities they build.
The struggle for Touati’s release is inseparable from the struggle for the PST’s right to organise, which is inseparable from the struggle for democratic and trade union freedoms in Algeria, which is inseparable from the struggle against authoritarian capitalism across North Africa and beyond.
The regime has made its move. We must make ours.
Take Action
Send protests to the Algerian Embassy in your country demanding:
• Immediate release of Lyes Touati
• Lifting of the suspension on the PST
• Release of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience
• Restoration of democratic and trade union freedoms
Further information:
Campaign website https://liberte-lyes.org/
Fourth International solidarity appeal at https://fourth.international/en/africa/741
Contact:
Your nearest Fourth International organization