Ruling MPLA wins election in Angola
THE MPLA won Angola’s election, a poll official confirmed yesterday – with party candidate Joao Lourenco set to succeed President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos who has ruled for 38 years.
An election commission official in the capital, Luanda, said the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had won just more than 64%of the vote.
The MPLA party, which has ruled since independence from Portugal in 1975, had predicted it would easily win, but the result showed a fall in support from the last election in 2012.
In the run-up to the election on Wednesday, the two principal opposition parties, Unita and Casa-CE, alleged the campaign had not been fairly conducted.
They complained that they had been deprived of media access and that voters in opposition strongholds were forced to vote at polling stations far from their homes.
The opposition parties had hoped to tap into public anger over Angola’s hyper inflation – that peaked at more than 40% last year – as well as low growth and high unemployment.
Dos Santos’s long reign saw the end of Angola’s bloody civil war – from 1975 to 2002 – and a post-conflict investment boom as the country exploited its oil reserves.
However, a slump in crude prices in 2014 hit the country hard. –