President Alassane Ouattara has won re-election in the Ivory Coast’s presidential vote, according to provisional results.
The country’s Independent Electoral Commission announced on Monday that the 83-year-old incumbent had won a fourth term with 89.77 percent of the ballots cast.
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Nearly nine million Ivorians were eligible to vote on Saturday in a race that excluded Ouattara’s top rivals. Ex-President Laurent Gbagbo was barred over a criminal conviction, and former Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam was disqualified for acquiring French citizenship.
The remaining four candidates were not seen as viable contenders, as they lacked backing from a major political party and significant financial resources.
One of them, former Commerce Minister Jean-Louis Billon, who on Sunday had congratulated Ouattara, received 3.09 percent of the vote. Former First Lady Simone Gbagbo received 2.42 percent, according to the results read on state television by Ibrahime Coulibaly-Kuibiert, president of the electoral commission.
Coulibaly-Kuibiert put turnout at around 50 percent – a level comparable to the presidential elections in 2010 and 2015, but far below the 80 percent who voted in the first round in 2010.
Reporting from the Ivorian capital Abidjan, Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris said the banning of Ouattara’s top rivals, as well as low voter turnout, had handed him a “landslide victory”.
“A lot of people are wondering whether or not this is an endorsement, but the electoral commission said more than 50 percent of the voting population participated in this election, which … could give Ouattara the credibility he needs to run a government,” he said.
‘Deeply divided nation’
Ouattara’s detractors accuse the leader of taking the country down an authoritarian path in which he chooses his electoral opponents.
Many voters abstained amid widespread anger over his decision to run for a fourth consecutive term. Under the constitution, presidents may only serve a maximum of two terms, but Ouattara argues his limit was “reset” by a 2016 constitutional overhaul.
In the weeks leading up to the election, sporadic protests had broken out in response to the ban on key contenders from the polls, prompting the government to ban demonstrations and arrest more than 200 people from campaign group the Common Front.
Al Jazeera’s Idris said it remained to be seen whether Ouattara could “unite a deeply divided nation” and that he had to do “a lot of hard work” to convince his critics.
Ouattara, who had a long career at the International Monetary Fund and Central Bank of West African States before becoming prime minister in 1990, has pointed to how much the economy has improved under his leadership, with increased foreign investment and transformed infrastructure and stability.
But social inequality remains stark, and corruption persists.
The former French colony and leading cocoa producer is weighed down by a public debt of around 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while huge gaps in education and health coverage remain.
“A lot of Ivorians say that the economic success hasn’t reached them yet. A lot of them say they still struggle to feed their families because of the high cost of living. And also, there are fewer jobs for youth to get,” said Idris.
Ouattara, he said, had promised to bring reforms to iron out inequalities. “But whether or not that will lead to massive employment opportunities, job creation, as well as more riches for people, it’s not clear at the moment,” Idris said.
Security threats
Ouattara’s campaign was heavily focused on security at a time of rising regional instability.
He enters his fourth term as violence threatens to spill over from Sahel neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso, where armed groups such as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the ISIL affiliate in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) have been conducting a violent rampage.
Ouattara’s government, since 2022, has boosted the defence budget, increased troop deployments in the northern regions neighbouring the Sahel, and bought armoured tanks from countries like China.
As internal instability mounts, he has vowed to facilitate a passing of the torch to a new generation of political leaders. There is no clear successor at the moment, and the ruling party is riven with division.
Rinaldo Depagne, deputy director of the Africa programme for International Crisis Group, said that failure to appoint a successor could tip the country into the same kind of crisis that followed the death of founding President Felix Houphouet-Boigny in 1993, which was marked by armed conflict.
“People saw that they didn’t have a future with politics, or they couldn’t imagine that politics would bring positive change to the country,” Depagne was cited as saying by news agency Reuters.
The Constitutional Council is expected to validate the electoral commission’s results in the coming days.
