Parties backing Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore have maintained their overall majority in the recent legislative elections, partial results show, amid cries of foul play by the nascent opposition leader.
Compaore’s allies will have 81 seats in the new 127-seat assembly, with 58 going to his Congress for Democracy and Progress party which has ruled the country since a 1987 coup, and 23 others to four allied parties, according to the results published Thursday by the electoral commission.
The regime’s comfortable majority in Sunday’s polls nonetheless represents a drop from the 99 seats it held in the outgoing 111-member legislative assembly.
The elections were the first since a deep crisis erupted in early 2011, when a wave of mutinies and violent popular protests almost toppled the administration of Compaore, who has been in power since a 1987 military coup.
The vote was also the last major test of Compaore’s regime before a presidential election in 2015 in the deeply poor, landlocked west African country.
Some of Compaore’s supporters want the 61-year-old to change the constitution so he can stand again in three years’ time, when his mandate is due to expire.
The electoral commission was unable to publish complete results of Sunday’s election due to problems in vote-counting in the capital province Kadiogo.
“We are having some difficulties, compiling the results for this province,” a member of the commission told AFP.
Kadiogo is a symbolic electoral battleground where Francois Compaore, the president’s younger brother and possible successor, was up against Zephirin Diabre, set to become the new opposition head.
Diabre’s Union for Progress and Change (UPC) party said it was “not credible” that the electoral authorities had failed to publish results for the strategic Kadiogo province.
Diabre, a former finance minister under Compaore, denounced “the manifest and carefully orchestrated wish to manipulate the vote in Kadiogo”.
Presidential party official Achille Tapsoba countered that the Ceni was being “prudent”, and said that the ruling party was happy to wait for the complete electoral results.
The electoral commission, the Ceni, has called on both candidates to take any grievances over the eventual provincial result to the constitutional court in order to avoid a serious post-election crisis.
Some 4.3 million people were eligible to vote in the elections which were monitored by international observers. The final turnout rate is expected to be high, over 70 percent.
The voting on Sunday was largely peaceful, although a handful of incidents were reported, including the theft or burning of ballot boxes in some villages, and a lack of voting papers and security agents in other areas.
A new biometric voter registration system was introduced after the opposition claimed voter fraud in past elections.
President's allies keep majority in Burkina vote
