Sudanese opposition parties and former rebel groups from the south could field a single challenger to Omar al-Bashir in next year’s presidential elections, senior politicians said on Wednesday.
“If we decide to participate in the elections it is most likely that we will have one person,” said Marial al-Mahdi, the daughter of former prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi of the Umma party, one of the two historically dominant parties in the north.
Al-Mahdi stressed that “no decision has been taken yet” about who to back against al-Bashir in the election due in April next year.
The secretary general of the southern former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Pagan Amum, said the principle of fielding a joint opposition candidate had been agreed at a congress in September.
“Yes, it is an idea that has been proposed by the secretariat of the Juba conference,” Amum said.
“Sadek al-Mahdi is one of the potential candidates, but there are others,” he added, referring to the former premier overthrown by al-Bashir in a 1989 coup that ended multi-party democratic rule.
Another leading Umma party official, Mubarak al-Fadil, said the idea of joint candidates could be extended to the parliamentary and regional elections that are to be held at the same time as the presidential one.
“A rainbow coalition would be in the making at all levels,” he said.
Representatives of about 20 opposition parties, who met for five days in the southern regional capital, Juba, at the end of September, have threatened to boycott the elections — which would be the first since the 1986 polls that brought al-Mahdi to power.
They are demanding that the vote be preceded by democratic reforms.
The elections are a key element of a 2005 peace deal between al-Bashir ‘s government in Khartoum and the SPLM that brought an end to Africa’s longest-running civil war.
The peace process is supposed to culminate in a 2011 referendum on independence for the south, which currently enjoys regional autonomy and shares power in a unity government in Khartoum. — AFP