Election of the Weekend: Cabo Verde

This Sunday the citizens of Cabo Verde will elect a new national assembly. The 72 seats in this legislative body bill be elected via 13 multimember constituencies, 10 of which are territorial, and three of which are reserved for diaspora voters (one for the Americas, one for Europe, and one for Africa).

Jose Ulisses de Pina Correia e Silva recently surpassed the 10 year mark in his term as Prime Minister. His party, the centrist Movement or Democracy (MpD), currently holds 38 seats, giving them a majority. He’s being challenged by Francisco Carvalho, current leader of the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV), a democratic socialist party with deep roots in the movement for national liberation. A conservative third party, the Democratic and Independent Cape Verdean Union, holds the remaining four seats and will contest this election as well. But they’ve never been all that relevant; since the era of PAICV one party rule in the 80’s, elections have been dominated by MpD and PAICV, with power swinging back and forth between them.

I’m not finding a whole lot of detailed coverage about this race, at least that’s telling much of anything you or I probably could have guessed. (Cost of living and youth employment are major campaign issues, for example.) Cabo Verde is a semi-presidential system; the President and PM meaningfully share real power. There’s a presidential election coming up in November that will, obviously, shape what whoever becomes PM after Sunday’s election is able to do. (The current president, Jose Maria Neves, is PAICV.) This tends to render the system consensual and compromise-driven, which lowers the stakes of elections to some degree.

Anyone with any more concrete knowledge about this election is invited and encouraged to share with us in comments below.