Following a week of protests sweeping across Algeria, one demonstration organiser has called for wholesale regime change as tens of thousands were expected to take to the streets on Friday.

“What Algerians want is to get rid of not just the president, but the entire regime,” said Soufiane Djilali, who spearheads the Mouwatana (Democracy and Citizenship) movement, which organised some of the historic protests against the current ruler, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. “The president must go, the government must resign, and the fake national assembly – all these need to be dismantled,” he said.

The 81-year-old Bouteflika has ruled since 1999 and will run for a fifth term in office in April despite rarely being seen in public or addressing the nation since he had a stroke in 2013. Thousands of students across Algeria joined the protests on Tuesday, voicing demands that Bouteflika drop his bid for re-election, calling him unfit to rule.

At least 15 journalists were briefly arrested on Thursday in the capital, Algiers, during a protest demanding an end to censorship, where police assaulted journalists holding signs that read “no to the muzzling of the press” and against Bouteflika’s rule. The demonstration was the second of its kind in a week after journalists for the country’s national television and radio service protested on Tuesday to demand their employers allow them to cover the mood of dissent gripping Algeria.

Hamza Zait, a journalist and political scientist who attended Thursday’s demonstration, said that Algerian police detained the journalists in an oft-used tactic to disperse and repress protests. “The protest was organised by a number of journalists to say no to Bouteflika’s candidacy, and also that the press in Algeria must be free. Right now, the press in Algeria isn’t exactly free – it’s manipulated, and they came to say that this needs to change and the press must be respected,” he said.

As hundreds and on some occasions thousands defied a protest ban in the capital, the country’s fractured and sometimes co-opted political opposition attempted to coalesce around a single candidate to challenge Bouteflika in the forthcoming April election by harnessing the anger of the protests. But as protesters and politicians alike voiced a collective dislike of Bouteflika, no single candidate has yet managed to unify both elements around a vision beyond changing the president. Equally unclear is whether the election could quell the protests, fuelled by angry younger people in a country where more than a quarter of people under 30 are unemployed.

Djilali told the Guardian that Mouwatana would not back any candidate in the election. “The street doesn’t support a candidate,” he said. “The election was organised with the aim of Bouteflika’s candidacy. We don’t want to legitimise a fake result, given that the rules of the game are neither transparent nor democratic.”

This has not stopped some of those vying to beat Bouteflika from attempting to harness the momentum of the protests for their electoral campaigns as potential candidates race to gather the 60,000 signatures needed to officially compete.

“If I go out into my village, in under a minute there’ll be 1,000 people out there to support me. No one here has the confidence of the Algerian youth, apart from me,” said Rachid Nekkaz, a pro-business candidate who boasts an online following of more than 1.5 million people. Nekkaz, a Paris-born property tycoon, renounced his French citizenship in order to run in Algeria and became known as the “Zorro of the niqab” after reportedly paying £270,000 in fines for French and Belgian women who defied a ban on face veils.

Nekkaz’s fondness for publicity initially led many to treat him as a joke candidate. However, in a phone call to the Guardian he described how he had been confined to de facto house arrest last weekend after being hounded by Algerian police while campaigning. “Everywhere the youth carry me on their shoulders – it’s why the powers are scared,” he said. Still, he added, his first act if elected would be a political amnesty law to safeguard those now in power. “My first objective is stability,” he said.

A photo of a grinning Nekkaz joining hands with other opposition figures circulated online on Tuesday evening, evidence of a second failed meeting to choose a single candidate despite the goodwill.

The TV presenter and potential candidate Ghani Mahdi, also pictured at the meeting, attracted the support of Khalil Benkhelfi, a student who took part in protests at his university in the town of Constantine. “We don’t need the current regime. We want a radical change in this country, to break through the wall of restrictions,” he said, adding that his entire class intends to vote in April, unlike in previous elections. Mahdi, he explained, “uncovered the truth about the system, unlike other candidates who we only see during elections”.

Top Algerian officials have begun to grudgingly acknowledge the daily protests. Following power struggles within the ruling elite, speculation has grown that the leadership could back a different candidate to succeed Bouteflika in order to ensure the stability of the governing regime and to cool tensions.

“The president is a red line,” the chairman of the ruling National Liberation Front, Mouad Bouchareb, told a group of party officials on Wednesday, days after the prime minister, Ahmed Ouyahia, provided the first official recognition of the discontent. “Everyone has the right to support their candidate, and be against any other candidate. The ballot box will decide in a peaceful and civilised way,” he said.

“What Algerians are screaming for is more dignity,” said Dr Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck of the Carnegie Middle East Center. “People don’t want this fifth term to happen, they want another candidate. What they really want is unclear, but they know what they don’t want,” she said. “Algerians loathe how their country is perceived abroad, this international image of a sick president unable to talk to people for years.”

Additional reporting by Adham Youssef

• This article was amended on 1 March 2019 to clarify in the first paragraph that Soufiane Djilali is one of the organisers of protests in Algeria, not the sole coordinator.