The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which has been in power for a long time, won a majority of the votes in last week's elections. Angola's largest opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, announced that it will challenge those results. The oil-rich nation's August 24 elections were the most fiercely contested since its first multi-party poll in 1992. The MPLA won the election, receiving 51.17 percent of the vote, ensuring President Joao Lourenco a second term. Alvaro Chikwamanga Daniel, the party's secretary general, said in a video statement sent to AFP on Tuesday that the opposition UNITA "does not recognise the results" from the national electoral commission and will file a legal claim "which will have the effect of suspending the declaration of the final results." The party asserts that it was "not notified of the decision" to validate the results by the electoral commission during the final round of counting and that it was not given a "copy of the tables with the final results." After the results are announced, candidates have 72 hours to submit a claim with the constitutional court challenging the results. Due to their concerns with the procedure, four of the 16 electoral commissioners did not approve the final results. Since the country's independence from Portugal in 1975, the MPLA has been the only party in power; nonetheless, the MPLA had its worst performance in this year's election, losing ground from its triumph with 61 percent in 2017. With 43.95 percent of the vote in this round compared to 26.67 percent in the previous round, UNITA saw considerable gains from the 2017 elections. Less than half of the roughly 14.4 million registered voters cast ballots for the eight parties that were on the ballot.
AFP
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