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The Central African Republic (CAR) goes to the polls on Sunday, with Faustin-Archange Touadera, who boasts of having steadied a nation long plagued by conflict, hotly tipped to remain president.
Since Touadera was first elected in 2016 in the middle of a bloody civil war, the CAR has seen unrest ease despite ongoing feuds between armed groups and the government in certain regions.
After changing the constitution to allow him to seek a third term, Touadera is in pole position out of a seven-strong field. Top opposition leader Anicet-Georges Dologuele and Touadera’s former prime minister, turned critic, Henri-Marie Dondra, are the most credible challengers.
Voting stations will open at 0500 GMT and close at 1700 GMT, and provisional results are expected on January 5.
But some opponents have called for a boycott of a poll they consider a sham. Critics accuse Touadera, 68, of wishing to cling on to power as president for life in one of the world’s poorest countries.
By the electoral authority’s count, some 2.3 million voters are expected at the ballot box, of whom 749,000 will have been enrolled for the first time.
Besides the presidential election, voters in the former French colony are set to cast their ballots for national, regional and municipal lawmakers, after long-running delays over issues with funding, the electoral roll and the country’s long-standing security woes.
Touadera was last re-elected in 2020, in a vote marred by allegations of fraud and an uprising by six rebel groups attempting to overthrow the government. That was only pushed back thanks to the intervention of the Rwandan army and Russian mercenaries from the Wagner paramilitary group.
The CAR’s quadruple ballot, along with Guinea’s presidential vote on the same day, will cap a packed year of elections across Africa. It has been marked both by the sometimes violent repression of the opposition and the victories of sitting presidents in ballots from which their leading critics were barred.
According to political scientist and civil society figure Paul Crescent Beninga, the CAR has seen “orchestrated” rallies across the country to plant the idea that Touadera enjoys widespread popular support. Images of the outgoing president have flooded the capital Bangui, with neon signs, giant portraits and T-shirts bearing his likeness everywhere on the streets.
While Touadera kicked off his campaign with a rally in the capital’s 20,000-seater stadium, his top two critics had to make do with neighbourhood walkabouts and events in schools or their party offices.
Both Dologuele and Dondra also faced the prospect of being barred from standing over accusations they held another country’s citizenship, with the requirement for candidates to be single-nationals, another clause introduced by Touadera’s 2023 constitutional tinkering.
Although the courts rejected their bans, Dologuele, who previously ran for the top job in 2020, had his Central African passport stripped in mid-October after renouncing his French nationality. That prompted him to file a complaint to the UN’s human rights office.
Since independence from France in 1960, the CAR has seen a succession of conflicts, civil wars and military coups.
The signing of peace agreements with three armed groups this year, as well as the presence of a United Nations peacekeeping force and of Wagner, which has around 2,000 mercenaries in the country, should nonetheless ensure a calmer vote than in 2020.
