The Ivory Coast’s ruling party and the main opposition both claimed victory on Sunday in the West African nation’s legislative elections, with the official results yet to be announced.
“We have achieved our goal of securing about 60 percent of the seats,” said Adama Bictogo, number two in the ruling RHDP party.
Early trends from local election commissions “clearly show that our party will win by a comfortable majority,” he added.
Earlier on Sunday, the center-right of the opposition party, the Ivory Coast Democratic Party (PDCI), claimed it had won Saturday’s legislative election and claimed the preliminary results were full of irregularities.
“We believe we have about 128 seats with our allies” in the National Assembly with 255 seats, said the highest opposition party official Niamkey Koffi to a press conference in the economic capital Abidjan.
“Our concern is that the results could be manipulated,” Koffi said, warning the government against “any attempt to falsify” them.
The conflicting demands for victory came after the Independent Electoral Commission announced early preliminary results, which Koffi said were “strewn with fraud, manipulation and manipulation.”
Saturday’s election was a key test of stability four months after violence before and after a presidential vote claimed 87 lives in the former French colony.
Koffi claimed attempts to turn results around in several major cities including the political capital Yamassoukrou, the coastal town of Grand-Bassam and key districts in Abidjan.
Turnout had been just 20%, he added, citing “fear of violence.”
The PDCI, in an unprecedented move, has forged an election alliance with the center-left coalition Together for Democracy and Solidarity (EDS), whose driving force is the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) for former President Laurent Gbagbo.
Their stated goal is to prevent President Alassane Ouattara and his RHDP party from “consolidating absolute power” in the world’s foremost cocoa grower, formerly an oasis of peace and prosperity in troubled West Africa.
In the most recent vote in December 2016, the RHDP and the PDCI were allies and won an absolute majority of 167 seats.
Last year’s crisis shattered that deal.
For its part, the FPI took up a decade-long boycott of election politics to participate in Saturday’s vote, in which more than 1,500 candidates competed for the votes of about seven million people.
Abidjan’s mayor Sylvestre Emmou, an opposition candidate, said three people had been stabbed and injured in the city on an otherwise quiet polling day. Election observers did not report any other major incidents.
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