Opposition (80) Others (84) Member State of the African Union Member State of the Arab League The People's National Assembly (Arabic: المجلس الشعبي الوطني, romanized: al-Majlis al-Sha'abi al-Watani; abbreviated APN) is the lower house of the Algerian Parliament.

[1] Members of the People's National Assembly are directly elected through proportional representation in multiple-member districts and serve terms lasting five years at a time.

In 1963, the President of the Republic of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, halted the activities of the APN and set up a Revolution Council lasting from 1965 to 1976.

After a predicted Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) victory, a fundamentalist opposition party, the Algerian People's National Armed Forces canceled the elections.

[2] By 2012, Algerian women occupied 31 percent of parliamentary seats, placing the country 26th worldwide and 1st in the Arab world.

In the legislative procedure, the president opens and closes the meeting, leads the debates and enforces the rules.

[13] The nine vice-presidents of the People's National Assembly, the distribution of which is the subject of a consensus between the different political groups which nominate their candidates beforehand, essentially aim to replace the president of the APN at the perch if this one is prevented, with a successive order of replacement going from the first to the ninth vice-president.

The permanent committees have an important monitoring role: they can conduct hearings and set up fact-finding missions.

They are trained to collect information either on specific facts or on the management of public services or national companies, with a view to submitting their conclusions to the assembly that created them.

Their mission ends with the submission of their report and, at the latest, at the expiration of a period of six months from the date of the adoption of the resolution which created them.

These are usually members from small parties or without labels close to the tendency of the main political movement behind the formation of the group.

They have their own organization and their own rules of procedure, elect from among themselves a president who will represent them within the Conference of Presidents and who will have several important prerogatives (such as the request or on the contrary the opposition to the creation of a special committee, the right to obtain a suspension of the session to convene the group, to request the vote by public ballot, to call in session for the verification of the quorum on the occasion of a vote, to prepare the order of monthly parliamentary day specific to their group, to propose or oppose the initiation of simplified engagement procedures.