A proposal to change Algeria’s constitution won the most votes in Sunday’s referendum and will become law, but the very low turnout undercut the government strategy of using the poll to turn a page on last year’s political unrest.
Fewer than one in four registered voters cast a ballot, Algeria’s lowest ever turnout, with many in the opposition “Hirak” street protest movement opposing the referendum and the vote taking place amid a global pandemic.
The final turnout was 23.7 percent, but two-thirds of those who did vote supported the changes, the electoral commission head Mohamed Charfi said at a news conference yesterday, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively affected turnout.
The poll was also seen as a bid to bolster Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, currently hospitalized overseas.
Tebboune, elected in December last year, had pitched the text as meeting its demands.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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