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Presidential candidates in Guinea, including junta leader General Mamady Doumbouya, held their final political rallies Thursday ahead of this weekend’s elections.
A total of 6.8 million people in the West African nation are eligible to vote on Sunday between 7:00 am and 6:00 pm (0700 and 1800 GMT), choosing between nine candidates, including 41-year-old Doumbouya, who is running as an independent.
Despite his initial promise to return power to civilians when he took over in 2021, Doumbouya is running for president in an election in which all the main opposition parties are barred.
In the capital Conakry, the junta leader appeared in public on Thursday evening to cheers from several hundred of his supporters. Dressed in sportswear, he danced to music, accompanied by tight security provided by the Special Forces, his former unit.
Earlier, Amadou Oury Bah, his campaign manager and the country’s prime minister, addressed the crowd, asking them to vote overwhelmingly for Doumbouya to allow him to “fulfill a constitutional mandate that will meet your expectations and needs”.
Guinea’s opposition is calling for a boycott of the vote, which follows a tenure marked by repression, imprisonment, and disappearances of vocal opponents.
Doumbouya’s election rivals are relative unknowns since all the leading opposition figures were excluded.
One of the opposition candidates running from the Democratic Front of Guinea (FRONDEG), Abdoulaye Yero Balde, also held a rally in the capital, where he called on voters to support him so “the future that lies before us will be the best we have had after 67 years of independence”.
Doumbouya has cracked down on civil liberties, and the junta has banned protests since 2022. Many opponents have been arrested, put on trial or driven to exile.
Since its independence in 1958, Guinea has had a complex history of military and authoritarian rule, including multiple military interventions.
