The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola’s (MPLA’s) landslide victory in Angola’s parliamentary elections, which saw it trounce the divided and underfunded opposition, appears to have surprised even its own supporters and consolidated notions of a one-party state for the immediate future in Angolan politics.
Provisional results indicate that the MPLA has won about 82% of the vote, with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) managing to garner only an estimated 10%.
Available results indicate that few, if any, of the smaller parties will achieve the 4% required for a parliamentary seat under Angola’s proportional representation system.
International election observers from the Southern African Delevopment Community and the European Union called the election free, but stopped short of calling it fair, a nod to the huge advantage of incumbency held by the MPLA in the run-up to the elections.
However, the transparency of the voting process itself was exemplary, presiding officers regularly invited journalists to observe the actual counting, a far cry from the behaviour of the paranoid United Nations officials who ran the flawed 1992 elections.
While there were some problems with the poll, especially in Luanda, where voting booths opened late and then ran out of ballot papers and voters’ registers, none of these was serious enough to affect the eventual outcome.
Accusations of sabotage from frustrated voters waiting for hours in the sun were addressed when voting was extended to a second day. ”Everyone will get a chance to vote, do not worry,” the presiding officer told impatient voters from the impoverished Boa Vista slum area on Luanda’s northern outskirts.
The biggest problem was voters voting outside the area in which they were registered; with thousands of people flocking into the city looking for work, their numbers appeared to have caught the National Electoral Commission by surprise.
With most of the votes counted by mid-week, the MPLA seemed set to take up at least 180 of 223 National Assembly seats. Final results, including allocation of the MPs’ seats, will be made public by September 20, but it was clear that hopes for a strong opposition showing had been dashed.
”The opposition has been eliminated,” crowed the state-controlled Jornal de Angola as the official opposition, Unita, conceded defeat at a hastily convened press conference on Monday. The best they could hope for was that the MPLA ”would govern in everyone’s interests”, its leader, Isaìas Samakuva, told reporters.
The opposition’s campaign strategy of accusing the ruling party of institutional corruption and elitism failed to attract voters, who may have been put off by the confrontational message. More than anything else, Angolans just want peace: ”We only want peace,” was the common refrain, especially among older voters.
In the run-up to the elections speculation among analysts and media was that Unita, although without its late leader Jonas Savimbi, would manage to hang on to at least 25% of its support.
But as results started coming in it soon became clear that the former rebel movement had failed to attract even a simple majority in provinces regarded as its political strongholds.
The former rebel movement was routed in every province except the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda, where it polled a near-respectable 33%. The pro-Unita vote was largely seen as a protest against Luanda’s continued military operations against a low-level insurrection there. The MPLA still managed to win the province comfortably, with 60%.
The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which launched Angola’s liberation struggle against 400 years of Portuguese colonial occupation in the early 1960s, it only attracted support in northern Zaire province.
The FNLA’s overall performance — 1,11% — is insufficient to have won it a seat in Parliament.