The party that has ruled Angola continuously for nearly 50 years – People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, claimed victory on Friday in this week’s election, after the electoral commission put its share of the vote at 51%, but the leader of the main opposition coalition rejected the results.
Fewer than half of Angola’s registered voters turned out for Wednesday’s election, which now looks certain to give President Joao Lourenco a second five-year term and extend the rule of the MPLA, which has run the southern African oil producing nation since independence from Portugal in 1975.
With more than 97% of the vote counted, the country’s election commission said on Thursday the formerly Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, was ahead with a 51% majority while its longtime opponent, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, had 44.5%.
“We have reached yet another outright majority. We have a calm majority to govern without any kind of problem and we will do it,” MPLA spokesman Rui Falcao told a news conference in the capital Luanda, a city that overwhelmingly voted for UNITA.
However, UNITA leader Costa Junior, talking to journalists and supporters for the first time since the vote, rejected what he called “brutal” discrepancies between the commission’s count and their own tally.
“There is not the slightest doubt that the MPLA did not win the elections,” he said. “UNITA does not recognise the provisional results.”
This election was Angola’s most closely fought poll yet. The results saw unprecedented gains for the opposition in parliamentary seats.
