Teodoro Obiang is expected to renew his mandate as President of Equatorial Guinea —a position he has held since 1979—, taking into account the first provisional results of the elections held this Sunday. With 21.8% of the votes counted, Obiang’s Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) leads with an overwhelming 99.7% of the votes, compared to 0.2% for the opposing candidate, Andrés Esono.
The data was shared this Sunday night by the Ministry of the Interior and is cited by El País. According to the Spanish newspaper, the opposition denounces what it calls “massive fraud”, listing various types of “scandalous and generalized irregularities” that will have occurred throughout Sunday: voters voting on behalf of relatives and, more than once, candidates for the PDGE at the polling stations and unavailability of papers corresponding to the opposition candidate — in Equatorial Guinea, voters choose in the electoral college a paper corresponding to the candidate they support.
For this reason, the largest opposition party, the Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS), has already announced that it will not recognize Obiang’s victory, if it is confirmed. “If you proclaim yourself the winner as a result of these outrageously fraudulent elections, the CPDS will not recognize your victory and will consider you illegitimate president,” a note released by the party can be read.
Obiang, for his part, has no doubts that he will be declared the winner. “I am sure that the victory belongs to the Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea,” he declared on Sunday, when he went to vote in Malabo, the country’s capital. If this scenario is confirmed, he should thus exceed the 43 years that he has already been in power and that give him the title of leader with the longest life in office.
However, you should not fulfill the mandate to the end. This is the opinion of various experts heard by Agência Lusa, who predict that Obiang will try to have his son “Teodorín” Mangue, current vice president, succeed him.
Elections in Equatorial Guinea. Teodoro Obiang is running for the sixth time for a term that may not end
Source: Observadora
