Although it obtained the worst vote of all time in a general election, the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) said Thursday that “it has a sufficient majority to govern peacefully”, after the release of official data by the Commission National Electoral Commission (CNE) that point to a victory with 51.07% of the vote this Wednesday.
In second place was the old adversary, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), with only 44.05%. “Don’t let them steal our hope,” UNITA leader Adalberto Costa Júnior wrote on Facebook in the afternoon.
In Luanda, the ruling party’s defeat was particularly harsh as UNITA obtained 62.59% of the vote and the MPLA 33.81%. Several observers attribute this investment to two facts: the elections had 5 million new voters compared to 2017 and the majority are young people, between 18 and 30 years old, who did not know colonial times or the two civil wars.
The MPLA, in power since November 11, 1975, achieved an absolute majority of 124 deputies out of 220 in the National Assembly, leaving UNITA with 90. Three other parties each elected two deputies (in percentage terms, they individually had little more than 1% of the votes).
By law, the leader of the party with the most votes is automatically president, which is why João Lourenço gets a second term despite losing 10 percentage points compared to the 2017 elections.
“We lost Luanda, but such is life. We would like to win with 98%, but the people rule. We are respecting the results, there is not a single gesture of ours that indicates otherwise,” MPLA spokesman Rui Falcão told Portuguese television channel RTP. In his opinion, the defeat in the capital was due to “the abstention of the militant base.”
The level of electoral participation was 45.65%.
UNITA questions
But UNITA said that the official data only reveals the data contained in the summary records, not including null or blank votes.
With 39.8% of the tally sheets counted at the national level, UNITA claimed to have obtained 46.89% of the votes, compared to 47.99% for the MPLA. A small difference that the formation hoped to overcome as soon as all the data from the province of Luanda, the largest in the country, were entered into the system, which will happen this Friday. And he claimed victory in at least three provinces: Luanda, Zaire and Cabinda, which has been officially confirmed.
At a press conference, the leader of UNITA, Rubén Sicato, called for calm after there was already some tension in the capital. “We have to assume the attitude of a responsible party, we have to have access to all the minutes” and “there is no place for us to create an environment of convulsions, an environment of some agitation, which is what our opponent tried to do all time”.
Sicato insisted that his party only wanted “transparency.” UNITA deputy Mihaela Web told the RTP network that the party had filed a new complaint with the judicial authorities because “the announcement of the provisional results by the CNE does not comply with the law.” She, however, admitted that this will not be done, because in Angola “judicial institutions still receive orders from the executive power.”
Before, when only 33% of the votes were counted, the number two on the UNITA list and vice-presidential candidate, Abel Chivukuvuku, had claimed victory. “Our counting centers [dan] clear provisional indicators of UNITA’s tendency towards victory in all the provinces of our country”, he said at another press conference in Luanda.
Faced with the answer, the MPLA was calm. “We must all wait for the final results and if there is a response, we must go to court,” added the vice president of the MPLA parliamentary caucus, João Pinto. “We will wait calmly for the results, as has been the tradition in Angola,” he added.
