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Algerian election set, where are the candidates?

ALGIERS — Algeria on Friday formally set its next presidential election for April 17, but three months before what could be one of the most important votes in the country’s history, no one is sure who is running.

The elections could offer a rare chance for change and new personalities in a country long dominated by aging military figures.

Ailing three-term President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, however, hasn’t made it clear whether he will run again. Even if the 76-year-old steps aside for a new generation, he or his military and government cohorts could have a huge influence on the election of his successor.

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The uncertainty before the April vote comes at a pivotal time as the country faces economic turmoil, endless protests, and a revival of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African branch of the terror network that grew out of the Algerian radical Islamist movement.

Algeria has long been run by the generation that fought in the 1958-1962 war for independence against France. Once the world’s youngest foreign ministers in the 1960s, Bouteflika took the presidency in 1999 and has dominated the country since.

The lack of clarity on whether he is running has kept other possible contenders from announcing their candidacies as the time for campaigning slips away.

‘‘It’s the first time since the establishment of political pluralism in Algeria that the candidates . . . aren’t known on the eve of the convocation of the electoral body,’’ said Mohammed Saidj, a political analyst at University of Algiers.

Bouteflika’s political party, the National Salvation Front, insists he will run for a fourth term, but there are creeping suspicions he is not up for it.

After he had a stroke in April, he spent four months convalescing in Paris and has appeared only sporadically on television, always seated and barely audible when he speaks.

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The president returned Thursday after four days in a French hospital for a check-up amid rumors that he is unlikely to survive another five-year term.

‘‘Algeria needs today a president who possesses all his mental and physical faculties to deal with the national and regional context,’’ said Abderrazzak Mukri, the leader of the Islamist opposition alliance. ‘‘Those pushing him to run are irresponsible and only see their own interests and not those of the nation.’’

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had been soundly beaten by Bouteflika. Now it has been reborn as a Saharan organization active in Algeria’s deep south and in the little-governed areas of Mali, Niger, and Libya.