Supporters of Guelleh — president since 1999 of the tiny but strategic former French colony — are confident of victory in the April 8 vote.
After 17 years under his rule, few doubt Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh will fail to win a fourth term next week, with a divided opposition calling the vote a sham.
Supporters of Guelleh — president since 1999 of the tiny but strategic former French colony — are confident of victory in the April 8 vote.
Since campaigning began on March 25 portraits of “IOG”, as Guelleh is known, have lined the baking hot streets of Djibouti City, capital of the arid Horn of Africa nation of 820,000 people, where his supporters parade in the green party colours of his Union for the Presidential Majority (known by its French acronym, UMP).
“We are optimistic, especially when we see that the opposition struggling,” Foreign Minister Mahamoud Ali Youssouf said.
Guelleh won the last poll five years ago with 80 per cent of the vote, after parliament changed the constitution in April 2010 to clear the way for a third, and now a likely fourth, term.
The main opposition group, the Union for National Salvation (USN), is a collapsing coalition.
Three of the seven parties that made up the USN have decided to boycott the poll entirely — the Movement for Democratic Renewal and Development (MRD), the Republican Alliance for Democracy (ARD) and Movement for Development and Freedom (Model) — while the remaining parties are fielding two competing candidates, Mohamed Daoud Chehem and Omar Elmi Khaireh.
“Our party will not participate in the election because we consider it a sham, the minimum requirements of transparency are not guaranteed,” said MRD leader Daher Ahmed Farah.
After parliamentary elections in 2013, which Guelleh’s UMP won with 49 per cent amid claims of fraud, parties had demanded the creation of an independent electoral commission, a key element of a 2014 deal to resolve a political deadlock and end street protests.
Under that deal, the opposition agreed to accept just 10 MPs — instead of the 52 they claimed to have won — in exchange for government commitments to improve protection for opposition parties and the establishment of an independent electoral agency. It was never created.
“The MRD has never believed in the sincerity of this agreement,” said Farah, who said the government only wanted, “to stop the protests”.
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