With nearly 55% of the ballots counted, Angola’s ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) seemed headed for a massive victory of more than 80% of the vote in the country’s first parliamentary elections in 16 years, reports said on Sunday.
According to the state electoral commission, the MPLA of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos was ahead in 17 of 18 provinces.
Should the results be confirmed, the MPLA would have more than the two-thirds majority needed to change the Constitution.
The official results are expected at the earliest by the middle of next week.
The largest opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), had so far received little more than 10% of the vote. The rest went to smaller parties.
Unita disputed the results due to problems during the two-day polling that began on Friday. Independent observers such as those from the European Union spoke only of poor preparation that affected some parts of the capital, Luanda.
Considered a MPLA stronghold, Luanda contains 20% of the country’s electorate.
Independent election observers from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) said that despite some problems in Luanda, the vote had been ”peaceful, free, transparent and credible”.
The EU group of 118 observers from 20 EU states, as well as Switzerland and Norway, is to present its preliminary report on Monday.
The elections to the 220-seat National Assembly on Friday and Saturday, while deemed unlikely to dent the majority of Dos Santos’s MPLA, are seen as a dry run for presidential elections scheduled for next year.
In 1992, the last time country voted, Unita leader Jonas Savimbi rejected his narrow defeat in the presidential elections by Dos Santos and resumed a guerrilla war that ended with his death a decade later.
At least half-a-million people are thought to have died in the war and millions were displaced. Dos Santos, meanwhile, remains in power after 29 years.
After Nigeria, Angola is now Africa’s second-largest oil producer, pumping out close to two million barrels of crude a day. A member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries since 2007, Angola is the number-one exporter of oil to China. — Sapa-dpa