POLITICS-GUINEA: Ruling Party Wins Parliamentary Polls

By Saliou Samb Reprint | | Print |

Saliou Samb

CONAKRY, Jul 12 2002 (IPS) - Guinea’s ruling party has won the country’s parliamentary elections, with 85 seats out of 114.

Seventy-two percent of voters turned out to cast ballots in the Jun 30 elections, according to Moussa Solano, the Minister of Territorial Administration, Decentralisation and Security.

Provisional results of the poll were made public this week.

This week’s result is an improvement for the ruling Unity and Progress Party, which in 1995 won only 71 of the seats contested. The main opposition Union for Progress and Renewal party, which is led by Siradiou Diallo, won only 20 seats in the Jun 30 elections.

And both Jean-Marie Dore’s Union for the Progress of Guinea and the Democratic Party of Guinea-African Democratic Rally, in power under the late dictator Sekou Toure, won three seats each.

The National Patriotic Alliance obtained two seats and the Party of Unity and Democracy one seat. Both parties are closely allied with President Lansana Conte.

Immediately, following the announcement, Diallo, who is the president of Union for Progress and Renewal party, refused to accept the results. “We are very unhappy with the results. Giving us 20 deputies is their (ruling party’s) way of throwing us some crumbs. We know that we are entitled to more seats,” he says.

Diallo claims that the polls were rigged. “We travelled to the country’s interior and everyone told us that there had been a lot of ballot-box stuffing than it had never been before. But we are not going to file suit because we know that all the members of the Supreme Court, which needs to approve the provisional tally, is in the president’s pocket,” he claims.

In their decision to contest the poll, Diallo says his party “had thought that the elections would be free and fair. But after seeing the results, we realised that we were wrong.” Diallo is one of four main opposition leaders — out of seven — who refused to boycott the Jun 30 poll.

Mohamed Diane, of the Guinean People’s party, says “the fact that the authorities waited ten days to announce the results proves that it’s a farce. We were right in boycotting the elections.”

“In Guinea, fraud is built into the system of government,” claims Dore.

But political analysts blame the poor showing by the country’s fragmented opposition on their failure to field a single candidate to challenge President Conte who has ruled this impoverished West African country of about seven million people for about 23 years.

According to the provisional results, six out of the 12 parties that fielded candidates in the Jun 30 elections will be represented in the new parliament.

The ruling party now controls more than two-thirds of the votes necessary to amend the constitution or pass bills initiated by the government.

In his weekly column in “L’Enqueteur”, Sekou Koureissy Conde, Guinea’s former security minister, wrote, “Constitutionally speaking, we are in a dictatorship”.