Ahmed Ouyahia, Algerian prime minister
   

The Algerian election campaign reached a climax (of sorts) at the weekend with a disastrously misjudged speech by prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia, who attacked the Arab Spring as "a plague" which is sweeping the region. Its effects can be seen, he said, in "the colonisation of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the partition of Sudan and the weakening of Egypt".

"The revolutions that engulfed brotherly and friendly countries such as Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia, Mali, Libya and Egypt are not accidental but are the work of Zionism and Nato," he continued. "The Nato countries grant visas to young people according to their objectives, to train in new technologies to create unrest ..."

Harking back to the country's independence struggle against France, he said: "The Arab Spring for me is a disaster, we don't need lessons from outside, our spring is Algerian, our revolution of November 1, 1954."

It was the kind of speech that Arab audiences used to applaud dutifully but which today is more likely to be greeted with derision. As an Associated Press report noted, anti-colonial rhetoric from the 1950s and early 1960s "has little resonance with the 70% of the population that is under the age of 30 and afflicted by a 20% unemployment rate". And there were probably many in Ouyahia's audience who would like nothing better than one of those sinister visas to train in new technologies – whether for the purpose of creating unrest or simply to earn a decent living.

For ordinary Arabs who have taken risks and suffered in the battles against dictatorship elsewhere, speeches that treat them as pawns of Nato or Zionism are deeply insulting – and it's no surprise that on Monday neighbouring Libya summoned the Algerian ambassador to complain.

For its complacency and its irrelevance, Ouyahia's speech sounded like a more sober version of Gaddafi's "Kleenex speech" in January last year denouncing the uprising in Tunisia, or Bashar al-Assad 
telling the Wall Street Journal that the Syrian regime would not make the same mistakes as Ben Ali or Mubarak.

It is a measure of how much has changed – even in Algeria – that such speeches these days appeal only to the diehards, while providing others with yet one more reason to rebel.