(Bloomberg) -- Mozambique’s top electoral court declared the ruling party’s Daniel Chapo as president elect in disputed Oct. 9 elections, triggering fresh protests after weeks of deadly unrest that have rocked the southeast African nation.
Chapo won with 65% of the vote — less than the 71% the electoral commission had said he received — Constitutional Council Judge President Lúcia Ribeiro announced Monday. Venâncio Mondlane, the opposition candidate who placed second, got 24% of the vote, she said.
Images broadcast by local television showed black smoke rising in several places in the capital, Maputo as well as neighboring Matola city, as protesters burned tires and barricaded roads.
Mondlane had warned of “chaos” if the judges confirmed what he called a fraudulent result released by the National Electoral Commission on Oct. 24.
In an interview after the the court’s announcement, Chapo said that once he’s inaugurated on Jan. 15, he’d talk to “all the political leaders in the country” to ensure peace — including Mondlane.
Though the ruling saw the number of parliamentary seats for the ruling party, Frelimo, drop by 24 from the initial results to 171, it retained a two-thirds majority. Podemos, as the party that backed Mondlane is known, won 43 seats — up from the 31 announced earlier.
“I know that this is a complicated situation,” Chapo said. “But I’m sure that we’ll find solutions.”
In the weeks leading to Monday’s announcement, at least 130 people had died — most from police gunshot wounds — according to Decide Platform, a local monitoring group. The unrest has disrupted operations at the nation’s biggest port, and impacted an aluminum smelter and mining operations.
Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries and one in three young people are unemployed and out of school or training. It has some of Africa’s biggest natural gas reserves, but an Islamic State-linked insurgency has delayed a $20 billion export project that TotalEnergies SE is leading.
Mondlane, who fled the country after police fired teargas at him during an impromptu press conference on Oct. 21, has been orchestrating the protesters via livestream from an undisclosed location. He paused demonstrations last week after a cyclone struck the country, causing devastation and death.
While election fraud claims in Mozambique are nothing new, the scale of the backlash is unprecedented since the first democratic vote in 1994.
Even before election day, there were concerns about the authorities preventing opposition supporters from registering. European Union observers flagged worries over ballot-box stuffing and the “unjustified alteration of election results.”
(Updates with Chapo comments from the fourth paragraph below the first photograph.)
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