Voters went to the polls yesterday in Guinea-Bissau for a presidential runoff between two former heads of state of the coup-prone West African nation, whose veteran leader was assassinated in May.
Observers hope the new president will bring a degree of stability to the former Portuguese colony of 1.3 million people, which has suffered repeated coups since independence in 1974 and now is a haven for drug runners.
Some 2,700 polling stations nationwide began opening at 7am and around 700,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots before they closed at 5pm.
Lines began to form outside polling booths on the Amilcar Cabral avenue in central Bissau as voting got under way.
Sidi Mankale, the electoral official in charge of a polling station in a former soccer club, said: “We began at 7 am and its about the same turnout as the first round.”
In the Chao Pepel district of Bissau, voters were thin on the ground, but electoral official Ankouan Lopez said: “There aren’t many voters because people are going to church first before coming to vote.”
Two former presidents, Malam Bacai Sanha and Kumba Yala, won the biggest share of the vote in the first round on June 28. Sanha secured 39.59 percent of the first-round ballots — a 10-point advantage over Yala.
The vote was triggered by the killing of long-time president Joao Bernardo Vieira by soldiers on March 2, in an apparent revenge attack after the assassination of army chief General Batista Tagme Na Waie in a bomb attack.
Last month the army killed two senior political figures in what they claimed was an operation to foil a coup plot.
Guinea-Bissau has been overwhelmed by the international drugs trade, becoming a key transit point in cocaine smuggling between South America and Europe.
But another priority for the new president will simply be clinging on to power. None of the three presidents elected in the past 15 years has managed to complete his full five-year term.
The murder of Vieira, who ruled Guinea-Bissau for much of the past 25 years, came about a decade after the military ousted him during a previous stint as president.
Sanha, 62, the candidate for the ruling African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), served as interim president from June 1999 to May 2000.
And Yala, 56, who was running yesterday as head of the Social Renewal Party, was forced out by the army in 2003.
Yala and Sanha have already faced each other in a second-round runoff for Guinea-Bissau’s presidency in 2000, when Yala emerged victorious.
Yesterday’s runoff round was originally to have been held on Aug. 2 but was brought forward to encourage a higher turnout as the later date could have intefered with harvest work.
Both rounds of the election have been financed entirely by the international community at a cost of 5.1 million euros (US$7.2 million ).
The national electoral commission (CNE) said about 150 international observers would be on the ground for yesterday’s vote and nearly 4,900 soldiers, police and paramilitary would be deployed to ensure security.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS