Some 9.7 million Angolans are headed to the polls Friday for parliamentary elections during which they also will elect their next president. The party of incumbent President José Eduardo Dos Santos is widely expected to win. The past few days have been marked by opposition claims that the elections will not be fair and transparent.
During his last campaign rally in Luanda Thursday, President José Eduardo Dos Santos seemed sure of victory.
Dos Santos said if all his supporters go and vote, nobody can beat them.
The president's political party, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the MPLA, is expected to win. Dos Santos, who has been in power for 33 years, has focused his campaign on young people, who have shown him their distrust in various protests over the past few years.
The president has been accused of corruption and of not distributing fairly the benefits of Angola's economic boom. But he still has the support of people for whom he is the man who put an end in 2002 to 27 years of civil war with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
UNITA, too, held its last rally Thursday. For opposition leader Isaias Samakuva, it was ultimately a demonstration to show that, despite a considerably smaller campaign budget, the party still can gather people around its cause.
Samakuva said that people walked long distances to come to the rally and that this shows that people are eager for changes.
Samakuva has expressed his concern over the last few days about the work of the national electoral commission. The party fears that this poll will not be fair and free, and has claimed that the electoral commision is not neutral. UNITA is not the only one to denounce alleged irregularites.
Angolan analyst Paula Roque, currently in Luanda, explains that people already are resigned to the outcome of the elections.
"The results are already determined, even before the polling. People are expecting to see the MPLA take a large chunk of the vote," said Roque. "Given all the irregularities, the missed deadlines, the intimidations, the lack of transparency."
Among the reported irregularities, many delegates of the opposition party have not been given accreditation to observe the elections, and some voters have been registered in the wrong provinces.
But Roque also says that this could help the opposition.
"People will probably abstain a lot," Roque added. "But then you also have a sense of civic duty. Young people say they will vote."
In an interview with VOA yesterday, Isaias Samakuva, who previously called for the elections to be postponed, said he will not boycott the poll, but will ask for the nullification of the vote right after the election. In the last elections in 2008, the MPLA won with 82% of the vote.
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