In February 2019, an anti-system protest movement known as Hirak became among the most powerful nonstate entities to arise in Algeria since independence. This paper is a discourse analysis of this ongoing movement, specifically of the online representations of Hirak’s slogans, placards, chants, manifestos, and communiques, as well as social media debates over their significance. Coupling this data with activist interviews and previous ethnographic findings, this paper looks at how and which signs and symbols (systems of signification)—including but not limited to those of the national anticolonial struggle—have allowed Hirak to enjoy unprecedented levels of symbolic power and political legitimacy in Algerian society today. What systems of signification are generated and mobilized, and what do they allow the movement to do? Findings reveal one example in the various ways Hirak’s re-contestation of once-‘settled’ questions of national belonging have allowed it to claim ownership of ‘Algerianness’ and Algerian subjecthood—a historic linchpin of social-political legitimacy—at the expense of the state. Underscoring in this way the abiding role of affect, this paper invites the yet-structuralist literature on contentious politics to make better sense of the various languages, repertoires and tactics observed in the politics of resistance. It especially allows us to rethink one of the key pillars of contentious politics: political opportunity. Social movement theory often imagines political opportunity as exogenous structures that act upon movements. However the Hirak shows a case where the meaning-making processes that arise in the intersubjective process of mobilization generate the worldviews and dispositions that allow political opportunity to operate at all. The popular ideational shifts forged through the movement’s own mobilization (notions that the ‘people’ were the rightful executors of a revolution confiscated by successive post-independence regimes) is what provided the foundational impetus and mass support for its repertoires of action in themselves (mass weekly protests, sit-ins, boycott of elections, boycott of negotiations with members of the ‘old guard’) and made them politically-available relative to past anti-system movements. This shows that political opportunity may be generated endogenously through movements’ own repertoires of action.