(São Tomé) The center-right opposition won the legislative elections on Sunday in Sao Tome and Principe, a small archipelago in central Africa, the Electoral Commission announced on Tuesday, without delivering the distribution of seats which will determine whether the centre-left coalition will cede power or not.
Posted at 12:36 p.m.
This small, very poor archipelago nestled in the Gulf of Guinea in Central Africa, accustomed to alternations in power, is considered a model of parliamentary democracy on the continent.
The Democratic Independent Action (ADI, center right), the main opposition party in the outgoing National Assembly, “won the legislative elections with a total of 36,549 votes”, announced the National Electoral Commission (CEN) quoted Thursday by the government news agency STP-Press. “The Movement for the Liberation of Sao Tome and Principe-Social Democratic Party (MLSTP-PSD, centre-left) came second, with 25,531 votes”, according to the CEN.
Abstention was 34.33% during this proportional vote.
It is up to the Constitutional Court, which had not yet done so on Tuesday evening, to deliver the distribution of the 55 seats of the unicameral Parliament, which will make it possible to know whether a government coalition emerges.
In statements to the STP-Press, the leader of the ADI, former Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada (2010-2012 and 2014-2018) affirmed that only his party alone guaranteed to win an absolute majority with 30 seats, which the MLSTP-PSD immediately contested. With 22 to 24 mandates of assured deputies, according to him, he can count on the addition of 8 to 9 seats from two small parties known to be left or center left to maintain a majority, assures the movement.
MLSTP and ADI have been vying for the leadership of the country since its independence from Portugal in 1975, at least since the first, a single party in a Marxist Sao Tome until 1991, opened the country to a multiparty system.
The MLSTP had managed to put together a coalition in 2018 to beat Patrice Trovoada’s ADI by a very short seat in Parliament, but the left appeared more disunited in Sunday’s ballot.
A majority of the ADI, which had won the presidential election in 2021, would put an end to cohabitation at the top of the state, even if the president – Carlos Vila Nova of the ADI – exercises only an honorary function.
Apart from some malfunctions in the keeping of the registers of certain offices, the European Union electoral observation mission on Tuesday welcomed “the voting and counting operations […] satisfactory with a good level of transparency.
Sao Tome and Principe is approximately 90% dependent on international cooperation and aid for its infrastructure investments and its imports of finished products.