ABIDJAN: Ivory Coast is holding legislative elections on Saturday, two months after 83-year-old Alassane Tuatara won a presidential ballot that extended his 14-year rule.
Polling stations in the main city, Abidjan, opened an hour late in torrential rain.
At Notre Dame college in the Plateau district, voters queued in a hall below a huge portrait of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the West African nation’s founding president.
“I don’t feel represented in the national assembly,” said 21-year-old Assi Gilles Darus Aka. “I am here to elect my candidate, so that he can bring forward projects for the professional insertion of students,” Aka told AFP.
Ouattara’s RHDP party has a majority in the 255 seat national assembly. Its candidates in the new poll include Prime Minister Robert Beugre Mambe and Tene Birahima Ouattara, a brother of the president and defense minister.
In October, Ouattara won a fourth term with nearly 90 percent of votes cast in an election in which most opposition figures were excluded. Eleven people died in violence around the election and dozens of opposition supporters were detained, including one deputy.
The PPA-CI party of former president Laurent Gbagbo, who was banned from the presidential vote because of a criminal conviction, boycotted the legislative election. About 20 members of his party are standing however.
The PDCI of Tidjane Thiam, another presidential candidate excluded from the October vote, put up candidates for Saturday’s election. One of them, party spokesman Soumaila Bredoumy, was detained in November accused of “terrorism” and “plotting against state authority.”