Parties supporting outgoing Congolese President Joseph Kabila won a majority in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) long-delayed legislative elections, an Agence France-Presse tally of results released yesterday showed as the opposition sought a recount of the disputed presidential poll.
Pro-Kabila parties passed the 250-seat threshold required to secure a majority in the 500-seat National Assembly, collated results from the Independent National Election Commission showed.
More than 15,000 candidates ran in the poll, which determines who will control parliament for the next five years. Pro-Kabila candidates secured 288 of the 429 seats so far declared, with 141 going to the opposition.
Photo: AFP
The huge Central African country, which straddles an area the size of western Europe, has been in the grip of a two-year political crisis triggered by Kabila’s refusal to step down when his two-term constitutional limit expired at the end of 2016.
A presidential election to choose a successor was delayed three times before finally taking place on Dec. 30, the same day as the legislative poll.
The poll’s runner-up, presidential candidate Martin Fayulu of the opposition Engagement for Citizenship and Development party, tipped by pollsters as the likely winner of the vote, on Friday told supporters he would demand a recount.
He said he would challenge Corneille Nangaa, head of the election commission, “to produce the tally reports from polling stations in front of witnesses,” as well as Congolese and international observers.
Provisional results released on Thursday gave Union for Democracy and Social Progress leader Felix Tshisekedi, a rival opposition candidate, 38.57 percent of the vote, just ahead of Fayulu with 34.8 percent. Former Congolese minister of the interior Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the candidate backed by Kabila, came in a distant third with 23.8 percent.
The declared result was a surprise to many observers of the mineral-rich, but poverty-stricken country, which has suffered two major wars over the past 22 years, as well as bloodshed in elections in 2006 and 2011 that saw Kabila returned to office.
Pre-election opinion polls flagged Fayulu as the clear favorite, while Kabila’s critics predicted an outcome rigged in favor of Shadary.
The powerful Catholic Church bluntly said that the election commission’s provisional result “does not correspond” with data that its 40,000 election monitors had collected at polling stations.
Fayulu’s bloc on Friday said that he was the true victor and had garnered 61 percent of the vote.
Candidates have 48 hours after the result to file any appeal and the Congolese Constitutional Court has a week in which to deliberate.
Polling day had unfolded relatively peacefully, but suspicions over the count have deepened.
The turmoil has darkened hopes that the country will have its first peaceful handover of power since it gained independence in 1960.
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