{{People in Togo are going to the polls in long-delayed parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n
The vote is seen as an indication of what will happen in the presidential elections next year.}}<\/p>\n
Experts say it could expose weaknesses in the grip of the Gnassingbe family. which has ruled the West African country for more than four decades.<\/p>\n
Opposition groups have held mass protests over the government’s last-minute changes to the electoral code.<\/p>\n
They say constituency boundaries were manipulated to benefit the ruling party.<\/p>\n
Angry demonstrations caused the parliamentary vote to be postponed from October 2012.<\/p>\n
{{Fires}}<\/p>\n
The polls have been rescheduled twice since then, as mediators struggled to bring government and opposition into agreement.<\/p>\n
President Faure Gnassingbe took power in 2005 following the death of his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, who ruled Togo for 38 years. He was re-elected in 2010, though there was deadly street violence in the run-up to the poll and complaints of vote rigging.<\/p>\n
Veteran opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio has joined Mr Gnassingbe in a government of national unity and says Togo is now in a “democratic system”.<\/p>\n
He is the son of Togo’s first President, Sylvanus Olympio, who was assassinated in 1963, four years before Mr Eyadema seized power.<\/p>\n
Two opposition blocs, the Rainbow Coalition and the Let’s Save Togo Movement, are running against President Gnassingbe’s Unir (Unite) party.<\/p>\n
A total of 1,174 candidates are standing in Thursday’s elections, with 159 women among them.<\/p>\n
Tensions in the run up to the elections have been raised by a number of mysterious fires. The opposition has accused the government of using the fires as a pretext to arrest its activists.<\/p>\n
Togo is among the world’s poorest countries. Its last parliamentary elections in 2007 were deemed by international observers to be relatively fair.<\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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