Algiers - Once the votes are counted in Thursday's presidential election, persistent social problems need urgent attention in Algeria or people will turn to an alternative way of expressing the popular will - rioting.
Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika is seeking re-election on Thursday in the country's third multi-party presidential polls since independence more than 40 years ago. He faces five challengers.
The north African country hopes to prove that it is capable of holding a transparent democratic exercise untainted by the fraud that has marred previous polls.
About 120 international observers will monitor the polls.
But high unemployment, widespread shortages of housing and water, and general neglect of basic needs have poisoned life in Algeria since independence in 1962.
One government after another has failed to address them, blaming the effects of 132 years of French rule, rampant population growth, the foreign debt burden or, since 1992, the civil war that has scared investors away.
Reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund to dismantle Algeria's heavily centralised economy have proceeded slowly despite large injections of cash earned from natural gas and oil exports.
Since Bouteflika was elected president in 1999, oil prices have risen steadily, swelling Algeria's foreign exchange reserves to $33 billion (R207 billion), against a foreign debt of $22 billion, contributing to an unprecedented state of financial health.
Last year's economic growth rate of 6.8 percent was the strongest in 15 years.
But little has trickled down to the half of the population that lives under the poverty threshold.
About 2.3 million people, or one-quarter of the workforce, are unemployed, hundreds of thousands because of massive lay-offs that came with the privatisation of lossmaking state firms.
Young people are the hardest hit, with half of potential workers under 30 out of work.
Social problems, especially in the poor sections of big cities, have fuelled popular discontent, turning teenagers into rebels and potential recruits for Islamic extremists.
The impoverished northeastern Kabylie region, stronghold of Algeria's sizeable Berber minority, has been in crisis since April 2001 when riots broke out over the death in police custody of a Berber youngster. That event was seen as the last straw, turning simmering discontent over living conditions into weeks of unrest that claimed scores of lives.
The anger is directed against an attitude that Algerians know as "hogra", a popular word denoting the disdain that those in positions of power - from government ministers to local police - display to the disenfranchised.
Stone-throwing youngsters want to expose abuses of power and protest the impunity enjoyed by well-connected people who scoop up scarce apartments, jobs and other advantages through backroom deals.
The unrest in Kabylie touched a chord elsewhere in the country, where rioting is increasingly seen as the only way to get the government's attention.
They regularly point to the lack of housing, water shortages, roads that have been promised but never built, and contemptuous treatment by men in uniform.
Housing is the thorniest issue, with an estimated shortfall of a million homes for a population that has more than tripled to 32 million since independence. The government is faulted for taking years to build a few hundred apartments, and then allocating them unfairly.