When the Algerians go to the polls tomorrow to choose a new president, they will be hoping - yet again - for a fundamental change at the top that will bring an end to their seven-year civil war.
All the leading candidates have called for some sort of dialogue with the mainstream Islamist opposition, which, though outlawed, is still probably the most powerful mass movement in the country.
However, any such overtures are unlikely to bear fruit unless the new president wrests the powers which the constitution confers on him from the cabal of generals who have long usurped them.
The elections were precipitated by what amounts to one endemic crisis within another. There is the larger "national" crisis - a combination of bloody insurgency and ever-deteriorating living conditions - and a regime crisis, arising from the army's illicit, remorseless, domination of state institutions. Without a resolution of the lesser crisis there is not much chance for the larger one.
The crisis repeatedly and typically comes to a head in a conflict between the president and senior commanders - even if, as in the case of the outgoing president, Mr Liamine Zeroual, he is a soldier put there by themselves.
The commanders almost invariably get their way. Not surprisingly, men like Gen Muhammad Lamari, the chief of staff, have come to be known as "the decision-makers". They conduct the war against the Islamic "terror"; they, or their dominant faction, are also known as "eradicators", believing as they do in a so-called "security", rather than a political, solution to the conflict.
None of the past four presidents has managed to complete his term. In his push for national reconciliation and a power-base of his own, Mr Zeroual collided with Gen Lamari and the "eradicators" - so venomously, in fact, that he more or less accused the army of sponsoring "death squads" who carry out massacres officially ascribed to Islamic "terrorists". He resigned and called for the free and fair election of a successor.
Could any successor break the generals' stranglehold? It is certainly more clear what, at bottom, these elections are about than it has been in any such popular consultation since the virtual military coup that cancelled parliamentary elections in 1992, deprived the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) of certain victory and ignited the civil war.
They are about a faceless military establishment, far from cohesive itself, desperately seeking someone who will do their bidding without question.
The army's candidate - deny it though it might - is Mr Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a grandee of the authoritarian, socialistic, one party era. His call for national reconciliation is less than convincing; critics say he is a true "eradicator" at heart. There is little evidence, from the hustings, that he enjoys any real popularity. But the army and institutions it manipulates are throwing all their weight behind him.
Whether that, without outright rigging as well, would be enough to ensure his victory seems improbable, especially since the elections have turned out to be a real contest. Acquiring a momentum of its own, the campaign has marked a genuine "return of politics" to a country whose destiny has for years been virtually hijacked by the struggle between "eradicators" and "terrorists", a struggle of blind, criminal, self-perpetuating violence without real political meaning whatever.
Mr Hocine Ait Ahmad, last surviving "historic chief" of the anti-colonial war and leader of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), is an ardent secularist who nonetheless insists that excluding the Islamists from the lawful political arena is disastrous as well as anti-democratic. Elder statesman Mr Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi combines both a nationalist and an Islamic appeal.
A former prime minister, Mr Mouloud Hamrouche, represents reformist political and economic ideas increasingly vindicated with the passage of time.
The outlawed FIS last week stepped into the campaign with a call on its supporters to vote for Mr Ibrahimi as the man "best able to reunite the Algerians".
In truly fair elections, he would seem to be unbeatable. But would the generals permit such an outcome? On the other hand, to prevent it, would they resort to the massive fraud that many now forecast? For that would be to risk an explosion of popular wrath, backed by all the opposition candidates, that could turn a contest in the ballot box into a violent showdown on the streets.