Ethiopians voted by the millions, responding enthusiastically to a open parliamentary race between the coalition that ended a brutal dictatorship and an opposition promising greater liberalisation.
The worst problem foreign election observers found on Sunday was the crowds, with some voters waiting hours to cast their ballots.
But a senior opposition official said after the vote that his party’s observers had been chased out of polling centres where ballots were being tallied.
”In many places our poll watchers are being kicked out and we don’t know who is counting the vote,” said Berhanu Nega, vice-chairperson of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy.
But his party had not yet decided whether to accept the results.
”This is too important to rush into a decision,” he said.
”We need to get all the data.”
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, known as one of the continent’s more progressive leaders, has pledged his sometimes authoritarian government would introduce greater democracy.
Many have pointed to Sunday’s race between the ruling coalition that ended an oppressive dictatorship in 1991 and new opposition parties who promise greater liberalisation as a test of his commitment to reform.
Following the vote, Meles said, ”I have heard the comments of the foreign observers and the elections were peaceful and democratic.”
But possibly fearing action by opposition parties, Meles declared a ban on demonstrations and open meetings in Addis Ababa, effective from Monday, and put the capital’s police under his direct command.
Berhanu charged that the ban was an attempt to cover up voting fraud. Provisional results were to be announced at each polling station on Monday and official results will be certified on June 8.
National Electoral Board chairperson Kemal Bedri said that by calling the results into question, opposition leaders are ”not doing justice to those people who have been standing in queues to vote for 10 to 12 hours.”
He said they have ”to be more responsible than that.”
Voters overwhelmed the polls — which closed at 6pm (3pm GMT) — but anyone in line at closing was allowed to vote. More than 25-million people had registered and election officials estimated turnout at more than 85%, much higher than in the 2000 elections that were seen as less democratic.
Ballot counting in most polling stations went on past midnight, and in some areas crowds of residents waited outside to ensure there was no vote rigging.
Ana Gomes, the top EU observer, was critical of an opposition call, made before polls closed, for results to be rejected.
”It is a bit difficult to understand why those who are also responsible for the success, want to discredit it so early,” she said.
Meles, the prime minister, had told reporters earlier his government would accept defeat if international observers said the opposition had won.
”I was very proud and fought to make sure the Ethiopian people have the right to make their own decisions. I am now exercising it as an Ethiopian and I’m very proud of this achievement,” said Meles, a veteran of the rebellion that overthrew the dictatorship.
Meles told journalists that people should await the reports of foreign observers — monitoring the elections for the first time in Ethiopia’s history — before making any conclusions on allegations of electoral abuses.
Gomes, the chief EU observer, had told journalists there were some scattered irregularities and violence, but that generally her observers told her voting went well and peacefully, but very slowly.
More than 500 foreign observers, including former United States President Jimmy Carter and 24 teams from his human rights and development centre, were monitoring the polls.
Voters began lining up before dawn. At day’s end, some stations closed on time, but voters were still patiently waiting in lines at others. One election official said he expected his station to remain open until midnight to accommodate all voters.
”This is a chance to get democracy and elect someone who meets our needs,” said statistician Firew Behu, who had been in line at his Addis Ababa station for seven hours and was told at 6pm to expect to wait another two hours to vote.
”If you are determined to do something, you have to insist on it,” Behu said, declining to say which party he supported.
Derje Woubeshet, an unemployed 29-year-old, said he was voting for the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy because he felt the ruling party had failed to create jobs.
But Wahib Toure, a cotton producer, said complaints do not make a political agenda and that he would vote for the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.
Ethiopia was an absolute monarchy under Emperor Haile Selassie until the mid-1970s, when a brutal Marxist junta overthrew him.
Civil wars wracked the ethnically fractured country in the 1980s, and famine took as many as one-million lives. Meles’ rebel group overthrew the junta in 1991. Meles became president, then prime minister in 1995, and is now seeking a third term.
In the 2000 vote the ruling coalition took 534 of 547 seats in the lower house of Parliament. The country is divided into nine states along ethnic and linguistic lines and each state has equal representation in the upper house of Parliament. ‒ Sapa-AP