[15] The FLN was established in 1954 following a split in the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties from members of the Special Organisation paramilitary; its armed wing, the National Liberation Army, participated in the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962.

At this time the FLN reorganized into something like a provisional government, consisting of a five-man executive and legislative body, and was organized territorially into six wilayas, following the Ottoman-era administrative boundaries.

[28][27] The war for independence continued until March 1962, when the French government finally signed the Évian Accords, a ceasefire agreement with the FLN.

In July of the same year, the Algerian people approved the cease-fire agreement with France in a referendum, supporting economic and social cooperation between the two countries as well.

In building his one-party regime, Ben Bella purged remaining dissidents (such as Ferhat Abbas), but also quickly ran into opposition from Boumédiène as he tried to assert himself independently from the army.

A statist-socialist and anticolonial nationalist, Boumédiène ruled through decree and "revolutionary legitimacy", marginalizing the FLN in favor of his personal decision-making and the military establishment, even while retaining the one-party system.

The first round of the parliamentary elections the following year saw the ISF win 188 of the 231 seats, whilst the FLN won only 16, placing third behind the Socialist Forces Front.

However, shortly afterwards, due to fears of the ISF forming an Islamic state, a military coup d'état cancelled the election process and forced president Bendjedid to resign, sparking the Algerian Civil War.

After formal democracy was restored, the FLN initially failed to regain its prominent position; in the 1997 parliamentary elections it emerged as the third-largest party, receiving 14% of the vote and winning 69 of the 231 seats.

The elderly and ailing Bouteflika is widely seen as a mere frontman for what has often described as a "shadowy" group of generals and intelligence officers known to the Algerians collectively as le pouvoir ("the power") and whose individual members are called décideurs with The Economist writing in 2012 "The most powerful man in the land may be Mohamed Mediène, known as Toufiq who has headed military intelligence for two decades".

[29] General Mohamed Mediène, the chief of military intelligence from 1990 to 2015 was known to be a leading décideur within le pouvior and for his secrecy with The Economist reporting on 21 September 2013: "Despite his leading role in defeating Islamic militants in a brutal civil war between 1991 and 2000, and his less public role as kingmaker in the pouvoir, General Mediene's face remains unknown; it is said that anyone who has seen it expires soon after.

As the name implies, it viewed itself as a "front" composed of different social sectors and ideological trends, even if the concept of a monolithic Algerian polity gradually submerged this vision.

This latter aspect led to the denial of or refusal to deal with the separate Berber identity held by Algerian Berbers who made up about 20% of Algeria,[37] something which caused fierce opposition and led to the splintering of the movement immediately after independence, as Hocine Aït Ahmed set up the Berberist and pro-democracy Socialist Forces Front (FFS) in Tizi Ouzou and began a rebellion in Kabylia which was defeated by the government in 1965.

Anti-Colonialism is widely considered as the core value in Algerian official discourse during its entire contemporary political and social history, especially during the formation of the FLN and later during the Islamist movement.

The humiliating failure of the Mokrani Revolt in 1871 facilitated the pro-Islamism sentiment in the society as people generally regarded Islam as the long-lasting and never-fading symbolic opposition towards the French rule; also the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 provoked sympathy in the Muslim community and strengthened the Islamic cultural identity and these two events together consolidated the Islamism-Colonialism opposition rhetoric.

[41] The movement absolutely rejected atheism and was not overtly secularist, contrary to widespread perception in the West, and Islamism was perhaps the most important mobilizing ideology during the Algerian War.

Still, after independence, the party would in practice assume a strongly modernist interpretation of Islam, supported the social transformation of Algerian society, the emancipation of women, etc., and worked only through secular institutions.

When there will be the conditions for a unity based on the liberation of the popular masses, Algeria will engage itself in the promotion of the formulas of union, integration or fusion that may fully respond to the legitimate and deep aspirations of the Arab people".

Given the global background of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War, Algeria was considered the entry point into the Third World in this ideological conflict; the FLN's ideologies under Ben Bella and Boumédiène were largely shaped by the fundamental needs of the country such as radical economic reforms, getting international aids and recognition, along with the domestic Islamic pressure.

[60] Facing the grave economic consequences of the Algerian War of Independence that included the destruction of 8,000 villages and millions of acres of land, a centralized authority, in this case, the FLN, was forced to act and redress the problem through a Leninist and corporatist framework.

[61] In response, Ben Bella also experimented the socialist autogestion among the Muslim workers who entered industrial and agricultural businesses that featured profit-sharing and equity.

[63] Despite being challenged by the Algerian Ulema and other domestic conservatives who criticized Ben Bella on the shallowness of his intentionally Islamism-leaning policies, the FLN kept its Marxist–Leninist organization principles that featured a secular institutional dominance over religion.

[64] The later FLN's ideological change towards anti-socialism and anti-communism can be illustrated by Kaid Ahmed's opposition towards Boumédiène's leftist agenda, which featured the radical agrarian revolution that hurt rich landowners who defended themselves on the religious ground and fueled the Islamic movement, which gradually took over the national sentiment later in the century.

The existence of different classes in Algerian society was generally rejected, even if several of the party's top ideologues were influenced to varying degrees by Marxist analysis.

Borrowed Marxist terminology was instead commonly reinterpreted by party radicals in terms of the conflict with France, e.g. casting the colonizer in the role of economic exploiter-oppressor as well as national enemy, while the label of "bourgeoisie" was applied to uncooperative or pro-French elites.

[42] During all periods of Algerian post-colonial history, except for a few years between 1990 and 1996, the FLN has been a pillar of the political system and has primarily been viewed as a "pro-system" party.

It mixes its traditional populist interpretations of Algeria's nationalist-revolutionary and Islamic heritage with a pro-system conservatism, and support for gradual pro-market reform qualified by statist reflexes.