Election of the weekend I: Cote D’Ivoire

It’s a big weekend for elections in Africa. We’ll start in Cote D’Ivoire, where a new National Assembly is being elected. A majority (169) of the 255 seats are filled via first past the post single member district elections, while the remainder come from 36 multi-member districts with between 2-6 seats. Those MMDs are not in any sense proportional, as voters must vote for a closed list for all district seats, with the first-past-the-post list claiming all seats. The current ruling party, Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire — Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (PDCI-RDA) obtained just over 49% of the vote and 137 seats in 2021, against a highly fractured opposition. They are expected to perform quite well today, and retain power. The first reason for this expectation: the presidential candidate they support, the 83-year old former World Bank economist Alassane Dramane Ouattara first elected in 2010, won re-election with nearly 90% of the vote just a few months ago.

The second reason is that the opposition remains hopelessly divided, and the largest and most organized opposition party, the African People’s Party (PPA-CI) of former president Laurent Gbagbo, has decided to boycott this election, arguing that conditions for a free, fair and credible election haven’t been met. Ouattara came to power in 2010 by defeating Gbagbo in a close and contested election with a number of procedural irregularities, that contributed to a prolonged crisis, civil war, and eventually a new constitution in 2016. Ouattara’s decision to run for a third term in 2020 was constitutionally dubious (the new constitution created a two term limit; his legal argument was that the term entirely prior to the new constitution didn’t count) and his 4th term required a strong-armed through the National Assembly constitutional amendment. The concerns of the Gbagbo faction about this election seem plausibly warranted. Some of the more credible potential challengers to Ouattara (including Gbagbo himself) were disqualified on questionable grounds and evidently similar disqualifications have occurred in some seats for today’s election.

From what I can gather the margins Ouattara obtained recently and the likely success of his PDCI-RDA party in today’s vote should probably not be taken as evidence the current regime is wildly popular, even aside from concerns about irregularities in the democratic process. The country is broadly cynical about its political system and its dueling corrupt octogenarians (Gbegbo is just a few years younger than Ouattara) and expects little to change under this backsliding hybrid regime.