Togo’s election commission declared the son of the country’s late dictator winner of the presidential race, extending the family’s rule into a fifth decade in a blow to Togo’s opposition, which vowed to take to the streets.
Provisional results on Saturday showed that Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe won 1.2 million votes, representing 60.9 percent of the roughly 2 million votes cast in the country, said Issifou Tabiou, the head of the election body.
Opposition leader Jean-Pierre Fabre, who had earlier accused the ruling party of rigging the election, received 692,584 votes, or 33.9 percent.
As it became clear that the opposition had lost and Gnassingbe would get a second term, Fabre led a group of about 200 protesters to a downtown square where they were pushed back by anti-riot police who fired tear gas, witnesses and a police spokesman said.
The election was only the second since the death of Eyadema Gnassingbe, who grabbed power in a 1967 coup, only for his son to seize power upon the dictator’s death in 2005. The younger Gnassinge went on to win elections that same year that were widely viewed as rigged.
Pro-Gnassingbe soldiers openly intimidated voters at polling stations and in several instances opened fire with live ammunition before stealing the ballot box, Amnesty International said.
Although the opposition has claimed that this election was rigged, international observers said earlier they have not seen overt evidence of fraud. But they say there is evidence that the ruling party tried to buy off voters.
During campaign rallies, opposition supporters chanted “We were not paid to be here” — a jab at Gnassingbe who they accuse of handing out cash and bags of rice to supporters.
Election monitors from the EU’s observation mission were present in at least four regions of the country when members of the ruling party handed out rice at a cost three to four times less than at the market, the mission’s preliminary report said on Saturday.
The district by district results indicated that turnout was between 70 percent and 80 percent in the north of the country, where Eyadema Gnassingbe was born and which has traditionally voted for the ruling party. By contrast, voter turnout was woefully low in the south and in the capital, the opposition’s stronghold.
Jean-Claude Homawoo, the vice president of the election commission, said voters were so used to elections being rigged that they gave up hope just when their vote may have counted.
“It’s the effect of successive failure. So many times we went and voted in elections we knew we had won, only for the opposite result to be declared. So people have become tired. They don’t believe their vote counts anymore,” he said.
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