Côte d’Ivoire’s President, Laurent Gbagbo, was ahead in an election, the electoral commission said on Thursday, but he will face a run-off against opposition leader Alassane Ouattara as no one won a majority of the vote.
Gbagbo won 38,3% of the 4,4-million votes cast, compared with 32% for Ouattara, a former prime minister and senior IMF official, the commission said.
The election was meant to reunite the once-prosperous West African nation and end years of crisis after a 2002/03 war split it in two, leaving the north in the hands of rebels.
But many Ivorians also feared that a close race could be disputed, leading to violent street protests in a country with a history of trouble at election time.
The main city of Abidjan was calm on Wednesday.
In the first official complaint about the tense and long-delayed poll, third-placed Henri Konan Bedie called for a recount and demanded the election commission stop announcing results before the official result was given. Bedie won 25,2% of the vote.
Cocoa exporters in the world’s top grower, which supplies 40% of the world’s cocoa — mostly from southern regions — temporarily stopped operations this week and expected to restart on Thursday if things stayed calm.
A handful of results have yet to be declared but they will not dent Gbagbo’s lead.
‘A clear intention to rig the results’
Hours before the total result was due, Bedie, a former president, lodged a complaint.
“The PDCI … rejects a clear intention to rig the results. The PDCI … demands that the announcement of the result be stopped and a recount of the ballots be carried out,” he said in a statement read out by his campaign director Djedje Mady.
Earlier in the day, several hundred of Bedie’s supporters had gathered at his PDCI party headquarters warning that they would not accept the results.
As predicted, Ouattara fared better in the north, where he is from and where soldiers who felt neglected by successive southern-dominated governments rose up against Gbagbo in 2002.
Bedie scored well in central regions where there are many of his fellow Baoule voters. Gbagbo’s support base was focused on the south and the west of the country. — Reuters