Mauritania’s government-backed candidate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani won the presidential election on Sunday, cementing the power of a ruling party that has positioned itself as an ally of the West against Islamist militants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The electoral commission declared Ghazouani winner late on Saturday with 52% of the vote. His nearest rival, anti-slavery campaigner Biram Dah Abeid, came second with 18.58%, while third place candidate Mohamed Ould Boubacar, who is backed by Mauritania’s biggest Islamist party, got 17.85%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The election was the first in the sparsely populated Saharan nation’s history, since independence from France in 1960, to choose a successor to a democratically elected president. None of the three remaining candidates got more than 10%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ghazouani has campaigned on continuing economic and security progress made under outgoing president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who took the helm in a 2008 coup, then won elections in 2009 and 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the leadership of the 62-year-old president, the economy has grown and will receive an extra boost when a large offshore gas field starts producing early next decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hours earlier government spokesman Sidi Mohamed Ould Maham had declared Ghazouani “president-elect” at a news conference, and opposition candidates represented by Abeid said they would contest the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Abdel Aziz surprised many of his compatriots and international observers by stepping aside after serving the maximum two five-year elected terms in Mauritania, a country of fewer than 5 million people comprising a large chunk of the western Sahara Desert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His decision bucked a trend in which African leaders, including in Rwanda and Congo Republic, have changed or abolished term limits to cling to power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite his economic record, Abdel Aziz has been criticised for not facing up to Mauritania’s most searing injustice: the persistence of slavery. Tens of thousands of black Mauritanians still live as domestic slaves, rights groups say, usually to lighter-skinned masters of Arab or Berber descent.That is despite the practice being abolished in 1981 and criminalised in 2007, the year before he took power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mauritania’s government-backed candidate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani won the presidential election on Sunday, cementing the power of a ruling party that has positioned itself as an ally of the West against Islamist militants. The electoral commission declared Ghazouani winner late on Saturday with 52% of the vote. His nearest rival, anti-slavery campaigner Biram Dah Abeid, came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64445,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64446,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64444\/revisions\/64446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}