DODOMA, Tanzania: Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan won the country’s disputed election with more than 97 percent of the vote, according to official results announced early Saturday, in a rare landslide victory in the region.
The result is likely to amplify the concerns of critics, opposition groups and others who said the election in Tanzania was not a contest but a coronation after Hassan’s two main rivals were barred or prevented from running. She faced 16 candidates from smaller parties.
The Oct. 29 election was marred by violence as demonstrators took to the streets of major cities to protest the vote and stop the counting of votes. The military has been deployed to help police quell riots. Internet connectivity has been on and off in the East African nation, disrupting travel and other activities.
The protests have spread across Tanzania, and the government has postponed the reopening of universities, which had been set for Nov. 3.
There was a tense calm in the streets of Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, on Saturday. Security forces manning roadblocks asked to see the identity cards of those who went out.
Tanzanian authorities have not said how many people have been killed or injured in the violence. A spokesman for the UN human rights office, Seif Magango, on Friday told a UN briefing in Geneva by video from Kenya that credible reports of 10 deaths were reported in Dar es Salaam, alongside Shinyanga and Morogoro towns.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday he was concerned by the situation in Tanzania and urged all parties to “prevent further escalation.”
The foreign ministers of the UK, Canada and Norway in a joint statement cited “credible reports of a large number of fatalities and significant injuries, as a result of the security response to protests.”
Tundu Lissu, leader of the Chadema opposition group, has been jailed for months, charged with treason after he called for electoral reforms that he said were a prerequisite for free and fair elections. Another opposition figure, Luhaga Mpina of the ACT-Wazalendo group, was barred from running.
At stake for the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or CCM, party was its decades-long grip on power amid the rise of charismatic opposition figures who hoped to lead the country toward political change.
Still, a landslide victory is unheard of in the region. Only President Paul Kagame, the authoritarian leader of Rwanda, regularly wins by a landslide.
Rights groups including Amnesty International cited a pattern of enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings in Tanzania ahead of the polls.
In June, a United Nations panel of human rights experts cited more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance since 2019, saying they were “alarmed by reports of a pattern of repression” ahead of elections.
Hassan oversaw “an unprecedented crackdown on political opponents,” the International Crisis Group said in its most recent analysis. “The government has curbed freedom of expression, ranging from a ban on X and restrictions on the Tanzanian digital platform JamiiForums to silencing critical voices through intimidation or arrest.”
The political maneuvering by Tanzanian authorities is remarkable even in a country where single-party rule has been the norm since the advent of multi-party politics in 1992.
Government critics point out that previous leaders tolerated opposition while maintaining a firm grip on power, whereas Hassan is accused of leading with an authoritarian style that defies youth-led democracy movements elsewhere in the region.
But Tanzania is different, an outlier in the region.
A version of the governing CCM party, which maintains ties with the Communist Party of China, has ruled Tanzania since its independence from Britain in 1961, a streak that Hassan extends with her victory.
CCM is fused with the state, effectively in charge of the security apparatus and structured in such a way that new leaders emerge every five or 10 years. Hassan herself was able to rise to the presidency as vice president without incident when her predecessor, John Pombe Magufuli, died suddenly not long after the start of his second term.
The orderly transition sustained Tanzania’s reputation as an oasis of political stability and relative peace, a major reason for CCM’s considerable support across the country, especially among rural voters.
Tanzania President Hassan wins disputed election with more than 97 percent of vote, official results show
https://arab.news/pnwpj
Tanzania President Hassan wins disputed election with more than 97 percent of vote, official results show
- The Oct. 29 election was marred by violence as demonstrators took to the streets of major cities to protest the vote and stop the counting of votes
- Two of Hassan’s main rivals were barred from participating in the election, leaving her running virtually unopposed
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
