Do we like them?

Do we like Abdelmadjid Tebboune?

Our score: 4 out of 10. Little of his own on LGBTQ+ people or the planet turned up, but rights groups document a hard line on dissent on his watch, with one pardon on the other side.

Abdelmadjid Tebboune is the president of Algeria, so this is a head of state rather than a celebrity, and the record is mostly about what his government does. Fair warning: the research for this card was thin on his own words about LGBTQ+ people, women or the climate, and we're not going to invent a position for him.

The best-documented story is about dissent. Amnesty International said in April 2025 that at least 23 activists and journalists had been arrested and convicted over five months, which it says was solely for peacefully exercising their rights. Several got sentences from 18 months to five years, including a poet and activist sentenced to five years for posts and poetry. Amnesty cites Tebboune on 24 December 2024 saying nobody should think Algeria can be preyed upon by a hashtag.

On the harm test proper, we found no quotes from Tebboune himself attacking LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. Same-sex activity is a crime in Algeria under the penal code, but that's the law of the country, and we found nothing showing him campaigning on it either way. That's a gap in the record, not a clean bill of health.

There's one thing on the other side of the ledger. In November 2025 Tebboune granted a pardon to the jailed writer Boualem Sansal, according to Al Jazeera. A pardon is a decent act, but it doesn't change the laws under which critics keep getting prosecuted, and Amnesty says the crackdown continued.

Nothing new on him turned up that we could verify from the last few months, so there's no fresh blow-up to report here.

So where does that leave us? It's a mixed result on both tests, with the weight sitting on how his government treats people who speak up. Support depends on how much you weigh a pardon against the sentences Amnesty documents.