Senegal’s veteran President Abdoulaye Wade on Monday claimed he had won a second mandate in Sunday’s presidential vote, but his assertion was challenged by opponents.
”We have largely won in the first round. They are the first strong and unchanging trends,” Cheikh Diallo, head of public relations for Wade told Agence France-Presse on Monday.
Macky Sall, Wade’s campaign manager and also the country’s Prime Minister, said the octogenarian had garnered 57% of the votes according to partial and unofficial results.
”Wade largely surpassed the 50% mark needed to be elected in the first round,” said Sall.
No official results had been published hours after polling stations closed, and Wade’s opponents described his victory claim as a ”bluff”.
Prior to the vote many of his challengers, including a former prime minister he sacked two years ago, Idriss Seck (47) have said only electoral fraud would make it possible for him to win outright in the first round.
And even before the official closing time of polls, Wade’s supporters had driven around the streets of the capital blowing car and motorcycle horns in celebration.
”It is an unfounded bluff. No candidate can reach the 50% mark, a second round is inescapable,” said Khalifa Sall, the campaign manager for Ousmane Tanor Dieng, candidate of the ex-ruling Socialist party.
”Wade is at 48%,” he said, adding a second round would be in keeping with democratic norms. He has earlier said the Senegalese people would not accept Wade’s victory proclamations.
”We are still planning for a second round,” he said, raising fears of unrest in one of Africa’s most stable democracies and the only West African nation not to have experienced a military coup since its independence, in 1960.
Private radios were streaming unofficial results as they were counted at polling stations and said with 35% of ballots counted, Wade had obtained 53% of the vote.
Voters thronged polling stations on Sunday in the polls seen as a test of the country’s long-held reputation of democracy.
Polling was extended by several hours due to late delivery of polling material in some areas and a massive voter turn-out in some of the more than 11 000 polling stations scattered across the predominantly Muslim country.
Sall estimated turn-out at a record 70%.
Wade (80), who was first elected in March 2000, was confident he would beat a record 14 challengers and garner the decisive 50% of the ballots needed to avoid a run-off round of voting.
”There will not be a second round, I will win,” he said after he cast his vote in Dakar.
Wade said he needed a second and final term to complete his year 2000 grand promises to reform the country, which had been under Socialist Party rule for the 40 years since independence from France.
He swept to power in a second-round vote in 2000, the first time in Senegal’s post-independence history that elections went for a run-off. Wade ousted Abdou Diouf, succeeding on his fifth attempt at office after 26 years in opposition.
Wade has embarked on huge infrastructure projects such as freeways but his critics accuse him of falling short on job creation and tackling poverty.
Clandestine emigration by youths seeking better lives abroad has become one of the electoral issues.
The election passed off peacefully across the West African country.
Head of the country’s national autonomous electoral commission (Cena) Mamadou Moustapha Toure, said the problems related to the late opening of polling stations and distribution of voting cards would not greatly impact the outcome of the poll.
About 2 000 poll observers, including 500 foreigners, were watching the poll. – Sapa-AFP