The president of the Comoros, former coup leader Azali Assoumani, won re-election in the first round of the Indian Ocean nation's election, according to official results released Tuesday.
Sunday's poll was marred by opposition claims of ballot rigging and a low turnout, but the head of the electoral commission Idrissa Said Ben Ahmada said Assoumani had won 62.97% of the vote.
The opposition candidates had denounced "fraud" and "ballot box stuffing" in several localities, after voting got off to a delayed start. "As in 2019, we are witnessing an electoral fraud by Azali Assoumani with the army's complicity," Mouigni Baraka Said Soilihi told a news conference, alongside the other four opposition candidates.
Assoumani – who has jailed some critics and sent others into exile – dismissed reports of irregularities from the opening of the polls, saying he had "not heard about it. You need proof," he said, adding that the low turnout was due to bad weather.
Assoumani, in power since 2016, extended his time in office through a controversial constitutional referendum in 2018 that removed presidential term limits. The president's arch-rival and highly popular predecessor, Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, was handed a life sentence in November 2022 on charges of high treason.
Nearly 340,000 people were eligible to vote in the predominantly Muslim nation, which declared independence from France in 1975. According to World Bank figures, 45% of the population of roughly 900,000 lives below the poverty line.
An estimated 300,000 Comorans have emigrated to France but once again they were not allowed to vote in the presidential contest, despite the promises of the authorities. Remittances from the diaspora totalled over 20% of the archipelago's GDP in 2022, according to the World Bank.
Assoumani first came to power in a coup d'etat in 1999, returning to power in 2016 elections. In recent months, he has made a series of promises, pledging better roads and hospitals, for example.