Liberian incumbent Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will stand in a run-off vote against former diplomat Winston Tubman even if he pulls out of the presidential elections claiming fraud, her party said on Sunday.
“If the opposition wants to boycott the process that will not stop the process,” Unity Party campaign director Musa Bility told Agence France-Presse. “We will go ahead. … If [Tubman’s] CDC wants to quit we will go ahead with the second round.”
The opposition on Saturday rejected as “flawed” provisional results of the October 11 vote that gave the lead to Sirleaf, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize co-winner.
In a joint statement, nine opposition parties declared the results “null and void,” said their agents would withdraw from the National Elections Commission and warned, “If the process continues we will not accept the results.”
The statement also claimed there was “a calculated and deliberate act by NEC to rig these elections in favour of President Johnson Sirleaf and the Unity Party.”
Tubman’s Congress for Democratic Change party signed the statement, as did the National Union for Democratic Progress of former warlord Prince Johnson, who ranked third with 11.2% according to the latest results.
The opposition stance fanned fears in Monrovia of a return to violence in a country still emerging from 14 years of back-to-back civil wars claiming a quarter of a million lives that finally ended in 2003. — AFP