Preliminary results show that Guinea’s 82-year-old president, Alpha Condé, has won a landslide re-election victory, giving him a third term in office after a bitterly fought election that has sparked deadly street violence.
With 37 of 38 electoral districts counted, Condé has secured 2.4 million votes against 1.26 million for his nearest rival, the main opposition candidate, Céllou Dalein Diallo.
“We are satisfied with the first results, which give us hope and confidence for a certain victory,” a spokesman for Condé, Tibou Kamara, told Reuters.
Condé’s decision to run for a third term has sparked repeated protests over the past year, resulting in dozens of deaths, including at least 13 in skirmishes since Sunday’s vote.
It has also raised concerns that he and other heads of state in the region are undermining the progress that West Africa has made towards multiparty democracy since the 1990s.
Tension still high
Côte d’Ivoire has experienced similar clashes this week as President Alassane Ouattara seeks a third term in an election at the end of this month.
Like Ouattara, Condé says a recent constitutional referendum reset his two-term limit. But his opponents say he is breaking the law by holding on to power, and that they will contest the results.
The rainy streets of the capital, Conakry, were calm after the announcement of the results on Thursday night, according to witnesses across the city, though political tension remained high.
“The results … are not in line with what happened on polling day. We have evidence of the fraud and we will challenge all of this in the Constitutional Court,” said a spokesman for Diallo, Aliou Condé, without providing any evidence.
Diallo has claimed victory based on his own campaign’s tallies.
A spokesman for the Commission électorale nationale indépendante (Céni), the country’s electoral regulator, defended the election as the “most transparent and the cleanest that has ever been organised in Guinea”.
He said official numbers showing more votes than registered voters in one district were the product of a “typing error”.
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