Kinshasa, Dec 31 (EFE). – The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, won last week’s chaotic and controversial elections by a wide margin, beating the other candidates with 73.34% of the vote, electoral authorities confirmed Sunday.
“Candidate number 20, Felix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, is provisionally elected,” said Denis Kadima, president of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), to shouts and applause from the crowd gathered at the tallying center set up in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.
Tshisekedi, who was seeking a second five-year term, won by a landslide over the other candidates.
Moïse Katumbi, a businessman and former governor of the southern province of Katanga, came in second with 18.08%, and opposition leader Martin Fayulu received only 5.33%.
Only one of the other sixteen candidates received more than 1% of the vote. In addition, seven candidates who withdrew during the campaign were still on the ballot.
The Congolese president’s victory did not come as a surprise, given the partial results released by the CENI in recent days, which already gave him a large margin of victory.
The CENI thus complied with the electoral calendar, which called for the publication this Sunday of the full provisional results of the presidential election, which will have to be validated by the Congolese Constitutional Court in January.
More than 40 million people – out of the country’s population of more than one hundred million – were called to vote on December 20 at 75,000 polling stations in the presidential, legislative, provincial and local elections.
According to the CENI, some 18 million valid votes were ed, representing a 43% turnout.
Opposition rejection
The elections were marred by delays, logistical problems, and allegations of irregularities by the opposition, which called for the vote to be annulled.
Before the results were announced, nine opposition candidates, including Katumbi, Fayulu and gynecologist and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege, called for protests on Dec. 27 to denounce the elections, which they called a “sham.”
During Wednesday’s protests, demonstrators accused police of using live ammunition, but security forces claimed they only used tear gas.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the influential Congolese National Episcopal Conference (CENCO), which impartially monitored the elections, denounced “numerous cases of irregularities that could affect the integrity of the results of the various polls in certain places.”
For example, CENCO highlighted vote buying, cases of violence and intimidation against voters, delays in the opening of polling stations, and the expulsion of election observers.
However, CENCO also said that its “parallel vote counting system” confirmed that “one candidate stood out significantly above the others, with more than half of the votes for him alone,” without giving further details.
Tensions and delays
At least 19 people died in violence related to the election process during a largely calm campaign but with some incidents, according to the Carter Center in the United States, which also sent an observer mission.
The elections were scheduled to take place on December 20, but voting was extended by up to four days in areas where logistical problems delayed or prevented voting.
The delays were largely due to the last-minute arrival of election materials at polling stations, a challenge that had been known since December 13, when the country requested UN assistance to deliver election materials.
The DRC is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa and has enormous mineral wealth (including vast reserves of cobalt, key to the production of electric vehicle batteries), but suffers from poor infrastructure across much of its territory.
In 2022, nearly 62 percent of Congolese, or about 60 million people, lived on less than $2.15 a day, according to World Bank data.
The elections were also held in the shadow of the conflict between dozens of militias and the army in the east of the country, and amid a new escalation of fighting by the rebel March 23 Movement (M23) in the eastern province of Kivu, North.
Tshisekedi came to power in 2018 elections, which were also disputed by the opposition and which many consider Fayulu to be the legitimate winner.
However, these elections marked the first peaceful transfer of power in the country since its independence from Belgium in 1960. EFE
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