Comoros holds a parliamentary election boycotted by some opposition parties

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MORONI, Comoros (AP) — Comoros held a parliamentary election Sunday that some opposition leaders pledged to boycott, accusing President Azali Assoumani and his ruling party of adopting an increasingly authoritarian stance and raising concerns over the integrity of the vote.

The one-day election will decide the 33 seats in the legislature. Results are expected next week, according to the national electoral commission.

Around 330,000 people out of a population of 850,000 on the Indian Ocean archipelago are registered to vote, the electoral commission said. However, opposition parties said they expected a low turnout, citing disaffection with the democratic process.

Assoumani’s Convention for the Renewal of the Comoros party and its coalition partners won 20 out of the 24 seats that were contested in the last parliamentary election in 2020. On Sunday, Assoumani cast his vote in his hometown of Mitsoudjé on the largest island of Grande Comore.

Opposition parties called the 2020 vote a “masquerade” and said it was not free and fair. Assoumani won a new five-year term as president in an election last year that the opposition also said was fraudulent, triggering violent protests on the streets.

The Juwa Party of former President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi was one of those boycotting Sunday’s vote. It also boycotted the 2020 parliamentary election.

Comoros is an archipelago of three islands off the east coast of Africa near Madagascar. It has been beset by a series of military coups since gaining independence from France in 1975, with Assoumani, a former military officer, first seizing power in 1999 by overthrowing the president.

Assoumani, 66, stepped down from the presidency in 2006 after one term but returned and won another election in 2016. He has been president since, winning three successive elections. He pushed through constitutional changes in 2018 that allowed him to sidestep term limits and avoid a previous political agreement that saw the presidency rotated between Comoros’ islands.

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S. Congress-funded research institution, has said that Assoumani’s presidency “has been marked by growing political repression and non-competitive elections.”

Officials said voting was going ahead despite Tropical Cyclone Dikeledi, which was expected to pass near Comoros and the nearby French territory of Mayotte on Sunday.

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