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Ivory Coast is holding legislative elections on Saturday, two months after 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara won a presidential ballot that extended his 14-year rule. Polling stations in Abidjan opened an hour late in torrential rain.
At Notre Dame College in the Plateau district, voters queued in a hall below a massive portrait of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the West African nation’s founding president.
Ouattara’s RHDP party holds a majority in the 255-seat National Assembly. The candidates in the new poll include Prime Minister Robert Beugre Mambe and Tene Birahima Ouattara, a brother of the president and defence minister.
In October, Ouattara won a fourth term with nearly 90 per cent of the votes cast in an election in which most opposition figures were excluded. Eleven people died in violence around the election, and dozens of opposition supporters were detained, including one deputy.
The PPA-CI party of former president Laurent Gbagbo, who was barred from the presidential vote due to a criminal conviction, boycotted the legislative election. About 20 members of his party are standing, however.
The PDCI of Tidjane Thiam, another presidential candidate excluded from the October vote, put up candidates for Saturday’s election. One of them, party spokesman Soumaila Bredoumy, was detained in November, accused of “terrorism” and “plotting against state authority”.
