Ivory Coast Parliamentary Elections Draw Low Turnout

Voting ended Saturday in Ivory Coast’s parliamentary elections, a vote marked by poor turn-out following a boycott call by opposition parties.

The election comes two months after 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara won a presidential ballot that extended his 14-year rule.

In the Yopougon and Plateau districts of Abidjan, fewer than 100 people voted out of the 400 listed on the electoral roll, AFP journalists noted.

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The Independent Electoral Commission (CEI) said early on Sunday the provisional participation rate was 32.35 percent, lower than the previous legislative elections in 2021 when turnout was 37.88 percent.

More than eight million people are registered to vote for members of the national assembly, where lawmakers from the ruling party currently hold a majority.

Elections in Ivory Coast are often marred by political tensions or violence, and more than 40,000 security force personnel deployed for the presidential election in late October had been maintained for Saturday’s polls.

“There have been scuffles, but they were indeed brought under control by our law enforcement officers,” Ibrahime Kuibiert Coulibaly, the head of the independent electoral commission, told reporters.

“These incidents are so minor that they do not affect the proper conduct of the process,” he added, without giving details.

Ouattara, who won a fourth term in the presidential election, cast his own ballot earlier in Saturday’s legislative race.

Polling stations in the main city, Abidjan, opened an hour late in torrential rain.

“I’m here to elect my candidate so he can advance projects that support students’ entry into the workforce,” history student Assi Gilles Darus Aka, 21, told AFP.

He had come to vote at Notre Dame college in the Plateau district, where voters queued in a hall below a huge portrait of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the west African nation’s founding president.

At around midday, turnout at several voting stations in the Abidjan districts of Cocody and Yopougon was low.

At one Yopougon polling booth, only around 20 people had voted out of around 400 registered at that station.

“Sometimes you don’t see the elected officials, but I give them my trust because it’s my civic duty,” Dominique Tanou Benie, a 76-year-old retired IT specialist, said, casting a ballot at a school in Yopougon.

Ouattara’s RHDP party has a majority in the 255-seat national assembly, which is voted in every five years.

Its candidates in the new poll include Prime Minister Robert Beugre Mambe and Tene Birahima Ouattara, a brother of the president and defence minister.

In October, Ouattara won with nearly 90 percent of votes cast in an election in which most opposition figures were excluded.

Eleven people died in violence around the presidential election and dozens of opposition supporters were detained, including one deputy.

The PPA-CI party of former president Laurent Gbagbo, who was banned from the presidential vote because of a criminal conviction, boycotted the legislative election.

About 20 members of his party are standing, however, as independent candidates.

The PDCI of Tidjane Thiam, another presidential candidate excluded from the October vote, put up candidates for Saturday’s election.

One of them, party spokesman Soumaila Bredoumy, was detained in November accused of “terrorism” and “plotting against state authority”.