The ruling party in Mauritania won a comfortable victory in last week’s legislative and local elections, a litmus test for the veteran head of state ahead of next year’s presidential race. According to official results released on Sunday,
The elections were the first since President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani took office in 2019.
He has presided over the West African country’s relative calm in the increasingly volatile Sahel area, and he is largely expected to run for re-election in 2024, but he has not yet declared his intentions.
Among the 25 parties seeking the support of the country’s 1.8 million voters, Ghazouani’s El Insaf party was the favorite to win.
El Insaf won 80 of the 176 seats in parliament, according to Dah Abdel Jelil, the chairman of the independent electoral commission (CENI).
Thirty-six other seats went to president-aligned parties and 24 to the opposition, nine of which went to the Islamist Tewassoul movement.
Tewassoul, which advocates rigorous adherence of Islamic law, was the biggest opposition organization in the previous parliament, in which El Insaf held a strong majority.
The remaining 36 parliamentary seats will be decided in a run-off election on May 27.
El Insaf was elected to all 13 regional councils and 165 of the 238 local constituencies.
The opposition has accused the elections of “massive fraud” despite an official turnout of 71.8 percent.
Ghazouani, 66, is a former army chief who is regarded as one of the primary architects of Mauritania’s success against jihadism.
His party was the only one to field candidates in all constituencies in this month’s parliamentary and local polls.
This was forecast to give him a boost in next year’s presidential ballot, in particular with the vast, arid country’s rural electorate.
