According to preliminary election results, Angola’s long-reigning ruling party has a commanding advantage over the main opposition.
The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) received 60.65 percent of the vote, according to the National Electoral Commission (CNE), which announced the preliminary results after 33 percent of the votes had been counted on Thursday.
Joao Lourenco has served as the MPLA’s president since 2017.
Adalberto Costa Junior-led National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the opposition party, claimed victory with 33.85 percent of the vote, although UNITA disputed the validity of the preliminary results.
Since Angola’s 1975 separation from Portugal, the MPLA has been in charge.
Political observers said UNITA had its best-ever chance of victory yet as millions of youth left out of its oil-fuelled booms were set to show discontent with nearly five decades of MPLA control.
Vice-Presidential candidate for UNITA, Abel Chivukuvuku, disregarded the preliminary results and declared that the party would release its own based on a parallel vote count using the same information as the CNE.
“We will have clearer and more tangible indicators tomorrow morning, and whoever wants to rejoice will… Chivukuvuku said at a news conference, “I hope it’s us.
The nation’s most contested election in decades was widely regarded as having taken place.
UNITA’s share increased from 13 percent in 2019 to 22 percent, according to an Afrobarometer survey conducted in May.
Even though the MPLA still led by seven points, nearly half the electorate was still uncertain. First-time voters included many young people, who make up 60% of the population of southern Africa.
Angola is the second-largest oil producer in Africa, but like many developing countries with oil wealth, decades of producing billions of barrels of petroleum haven’t done anything for the majority of people other than drive up the cost of life.
More than half of Angolans under 25 are unemployed, and half of the population lives in poverty.
After casting his vote in the Nova Urbanizacao neighborhood, a 59-year-old former military commander told the news agency Reuters that “the residents have nothing — no water, no light, youngsters feed from waste bins.”
Many voters had less faith in the democracy of Angola.
Concerned about the fraud that tainted previous elections, an activist monitoring group called Mudei Movement has collected photos of results sheets at as many polling places as possible.
As polls closed in the evening, many voters appeared to be heeding UNITA’s advice to stay close to polling places after casting their ballots.
“The cops advised voting and leaving. In Cacuano, a town west of Luanda, Severano Manuel, 28, said, “I told them I would vote and sit down. “I hate school. The health system is terrible. He stated, echoing the feelings of several young people present, “They become wealthy, and we suffer.
The election commission had previously stated that there had been no commotions that would have endangered the procedure.
Changes to vote-counting procedures were predicted to cause a days-long delay in the release of official results. It was not anticipated that the provisional results would be announced so quickly.
Lucas Quilunda, a spokesman for the CNE, stated that “voting is over, the vote count is ongoing, and we cannot have any projections on the [announcement of] final results until this [process] is concluded.”
According to a report by the Institute for Security Studies, if an MPLA victory is thought to be fraudulent, unrest may result.
If UNITA triumphs, it may erode decades of tight ties with Moscow, whose MPLA served as a Cold Conflict proxies during the 27-year civil war that concluded in Angola in 2002. UNITA was backed by the US.
‘The invasion of Ukraine by Russia,’ UNITA said, according to Costa Junior on Twitter. In order to strengthen his relationships with Western allies before the elections, he also visited Washington and Brussels.
In March, Angolan media reported that Russian Ambassador Vladimir Tararov praised Angola for its objectivity in not voting in favor of the UN resolution denouncing the violence in Ukraine. UNITA’s desire to demonstrate that it “stands with the West, the so-called civilised countries,” was denounced by him.
According to Charles Ray, director of the Africa Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “A UNITA victory would signal a distancing of Angola from Russia,” but only after it consolidates control over a militarily supportive of Russia.
Just before the elections, Lourenco applied to join a trade pact that has been in place since 2016 with the European Union and southern African governments. Lourenco has attempted to enhance ties with Washington. Soon, negotiations will begin.
