Symbolically, the National Liberation Front’s (Front de Libération National, FLN) position in Algerian politics is incontestable. It spearheaded the War of Independence (1954-1962) and enjoyed single-party status until the advent of the multi-party era in 1989, losing local and national elections in 1990, 1991, and 1997. The FLN has been ascendant since the election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 1999, winning local and national elections in 2002 and 2007. Institutionally, the party apparatus is described as a transmission belt used in conjunction with national unions and associational groups to channel the regime’s policies to the most local-level). With few exceptions, analysis has been elite-driven, macro-institutional, and contextualized in a “top-down” framework. While revealing the broad contours of the Algerian political system, macro-level studies nevertheless offer conflicting and sometimes confusing analysis of the party’s gravitas and role in the political system. On the one hand, scholars underscore the FLN’s inherent weakness, largely due to internal rivalries dating to the anti-colonial struggle or the “clannish” and divided nature of Algerian elite politics . On the other hand, the FLN has been widely considered as the third leg of the so-called “iron triangle” of military, bureaucracy, and party. Viewed exclusively from the “top-down” perspective, the divergent narratives appear irreconcilable (i.e. iron pillar of the regime or myth / façade), creating a debate which obfuscates the nature of Algerian politics by under-articulating the political processes through which the “transmission belt” links the local and national political arenas. This paper seeks to reconcile the two narratives by looking at the institutional and political links between the Algerian state and FLN party at the local, regional, and national-level. Using the case of the FLN party’s Oran-based cells and regional federation during the 2004 presidential, and 2007 local assembly elections, this study shows that while weak at the national-level, the party’s political importance is at the local-level, where the regime uses the local FLN networks as a support base, often bypassing political decisions of the FLN Central Committee and Political Bureau at the national level. It also show how FLN cells and federations negotiate the mobilization capacity of their local networks with the State in order to reinforce bargaining power with the FLN national leadership, especially in determining party lists. A bottom-up approach complements extant macro-level studies by clearly defining the processes by which the local and national arenas are linked in the Algerian political system