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Chad’s Supreme Court said on Wednesday that nine candidates, including incumbent President Idriss Deby Itno, had been approved to run in the country’s April 11 presidential election.
The court rejected seven candidates but upheld 10 candidates in the vote against a fractured opposition to Deby, who has ruled Chad with an iron fist since a 1990 coup.
But opposition leader Saleh Kebzabo had already said on Monday that he would withdraw from the race after a deadly shootout with security forces at the home of another candidate, Yaya Dillo Djerou.
In a letter to the Supreme Court which he transmitted to AFP on Wednesday evening, Kebzabo repeated that he “had refused to cover an electoral masquerade”.
Judges rejected Yaya Dillo’s candidacy alongside a young rising opposition leader and harsh critic of the regime, Succes Masra, with the court saying their parties were not “legally established.”
International rights groups, the UN and France have called for an investigation into the shootings at Yaya Dillo’s home, in which his party said five members of his family were dead.
The government only acknowledged the deaths of his mother and two soldiers, while Yaya Dillo himself escaped unscathed from the attempt to arrest him for alleged libel against Deby’s wife.
Ndjamena has systematically banned or interrupted in recent months all attempts to demonstrate by the opposition and civil society groups calling for “a change of government and more social justice”.
Last month Amnesty International called the bans “unnecessary and disproportionate restrictions on the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly”, also denouncing “the arbitrary arrests”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday called for a “swift and rigorous investigation”, adding that he “regretted the use of violence and the resulting loss of life” in the attempted arrest of Yaya Dillo.
With eight challengers divided between genuine opponents and those seen by analysts as fronts of the regime, Deby looks set to be re-elected for a sixth term, in a scenario resembling a new presidential election.
As the leader of the party with the most seats in parliament behind Deby’s MPS, Felix Nialbe Romadoumngar is the official leader of the opposition and most likely to gain significant support.
Meanwhile, political newcomer Theophile Bongoro Bebzoune was briefly anointed the surprise replacement candidate of a coalition that had backed Kebzabo, before that alliance broke up.
Kebzabo and other opposition leaders accused Bongoro of being “managed” by the Deby camp to divide the challengers.
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