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President Alassane Ouattara’s RHDP won 137 of the 254 disputed seats, against 91 for the opposition parties, according to official results.
Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara’s party won a majority in legislative elections last weekend, official results showed.
Ouattara’s RHDP won 137 of the 254 seats contested against 91 for opposition parties in Saturday’s polls, according to results released Tuesday by the country’s electoral commission.
The vote was conducted peacefully and for the first time in 10 years it included all the main political actors in the country, giving hope that Côte d’Ivoire has started to emerge from the recent turmoil.
It was a key test of stability after the violence surrounding the October presidential poll, boycotted by the opposition, and killed 87 people.
The main PDCI opposition, however, alleged electoral fraud, while the FPI party of former President Laurent Gbagbo called on its supporters to remain calm and wait for the official results.
Tuesday’s results showed that the largest opposition group will be a coalition formed by members of the PDCI and supporters of Gbagbo, which won 50 seats.
A seat remains vacant in the 255-seat assembly due to the death of a candidate in a northern constituency, where an election will be held in a month’s time.
The turnout was 37.88%, the same as in the last parliamentary elections in 2016.
“The RHDP has succeeded in tipping many regions in its favor and it is in the process of acquiring the status of a national party, beyond its traditional strongholds in the north of the country,” said political scientist Sylvain N’Guessan , quoted by the AFP news agency before the full results.
The PDCI, the party of former President Henri Konan Bedie, “seems to be losing momentum,” he said. The return of Gbagbo’s FPI, or the Ivorian Popular Front, which participated after a 10-year boycott, “had no great influence on either the score or the turnout,” N’Guessan said.
The FPI had boycotted all polls since Gbagbo’s arrest in 2011 in Abidjan and his subsequent transfer to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
His arrest follows the violence that followed the 2010 presidential election in which 3,000 people died. Gbagbo was acquitted in January 2019 and now lives in Brussels awaiting the outcome of an appeal, although he has announced his intention to return home.
Ouattara recently reached out to his old enemy in an attempt at “national reconciliation” and issued Gbagbo with two passports, one of them a diplomatic pass.
The 79-year-old president sparked political unrest last year when he announced he would run for a third term – a program that critics said circumvented constitutional boundaries.
In the 2016 National Assembly elections, the RHDP won 167 seats plus the support of its allies. He held more than two-thirds of the seats – a so-called qualified majority allowing him to approve changes to the constitution.
He has now lost that option, even if his majority is still large enough to advance the reforms outlined by Ouattara during his controversial third changeover to the presidency.
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