President Azali Assoumani, 65, is running for his own succession in a presidential election on Sunday, January 14, which appears to be tailor-made for him. First elected in 1999 following a coup d'état, the retired colonel is running for a third consecutive term in the archipelago of 870,000 residents. The duration of his presidency and his stranglehold on Comorian institutions have raised concerns in the opposition, which accuses the current acting president of the African Union (AU) of seeking to lock in his re-election.
In Moroni, the capital, the vote looks more like a referendum on Assoumani whom campaign posters present as "the architect of tomorrow's Comoros." The five opposition candidates, who have pledged to unite in the event of a possible second round, scheduled for February 25, shared a common slogan: "Azali Nalawe" ("Azali, get out").
The Comorian opposition is desperate to avoid a repeat of the 2019 election when Assoumani was re-elected in the first round with 60% of the vote, at the end of a ballot it deemed marred by irregularities.
Salim Issa, the candidate for the Juwa party, chaired by former President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, who has been in prison for six years, says he fears "a new farce." Despite his lack of political experience, the orthopedic doctor, who was still unknown to the public just a few months ago, is emerging as the incumbent president's main rival.
"We have no confidence in the Supreme Court or the electoral commission," he said from the electoral commission headquarters, where he insists he had to "beg" until Thursday for the accreditations of his party's representatives, which are necessary to enter the polling stations. The opposition accuses the institutions of collusion with the president since 2018 when a constitutional reform allowed greater centralization of powers in the hands of the executive. Assoumani denies the accusation. "The sincerity of the ballot is today prey to threats that risk dragging our country towards a dangerous and unbelievable situation," said the five opposition candidates in a statement dated January 12.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) is in the spotlight. Several candidates are complaining of irregularities in the lists of polling station members. The institution is also slow to issue accreditations to civil society observers. It is "a source of deep concern that could delegitimize the ballot," said a diplomat, who also points to the high proportion of proxy votes – 20% of the electorate. Another cause for concern is that, 10 days before the start of the campaign, Harimia Ahmed, the senior Supreme Court magistrate responsible for monitoring the elections, was suddenly dismissed by presidential decree.
Regardless of the criticism, the former colonel, who returned to lead the Union of the Comoros in 2016, is eager to do battle. "Our objective is simply to get through the first round," he told Le Monde. This is his campaign slogan: "Gwa Ndzima" ("knock out in one go" in Shikomori). Assoumani emphasizes the continuity of his project, almost eight years after his return to power. "A trajectory well on the way to 2030," he emphasizes in his program of major achievements: building roads and hospitals, rehabilitating hotels to make the archipelago a tourist destination and raising the international profile of the Comoros thanks to its accession to the rotating presidency of the African Union.
But has Azali abandoned the Comorian terroir in the run-up to 2023? As a sign of the rumblings, the Alliance de la Mouvance Présidentielle (AMP) caravan was chased out of several towns during the campaign, including in the presence of the president.
In the archipelago, where 45% of residents of the three islands live below the poverty line according to World Bank figures, the president's record is often contested. The last few months, in particular, have been marked by long water outages – the price of which recently tripled – and electricity cuts. "We'd find ourselves in the dark for three or four days at a time," said Mariama, a civil servant who prefers not to reveal her identity.
"The situation is disastrous," said Ankili Mahamoud, a philosophy teacher on the island of Anjouan. He has been observing the two-and-a-half-month strike by Comorian teachers, which began on November 17 to demand, in vain, a raise. "At a time when the price of food is doubling," he said, "we're at our wits' end." Public-sector teachers earn an average of €250 a month in Comoros, a country whose budget relies in part on remittances from the diaspora living in France.
Elected in 2016 on the slogan "Un jeune, un emploi" ("One young person, one job"), Assoumani defends himself by claiming that his record has been "compromised by the coronavirus crisis." The employment rate stands at just 54% of the population, according to data from the French Treasury. "Our priority is to bring to fruition the Emerging Comoros Plan (PCE), which will ultimately develop our country," the head of state prefers to emphasize. Of the €4 billion of investment that the government claimed to have collected in December 2019 at the conference of Comoros' development partners, just over 1 billion is said to be in the process of being disbursed. Should he be re-elected, however, Assoumani could soon inaugurate two major projects begun during his tenure, which is coming to an end: the luxury Galawa hotel in the north of the island and the El-Maarouf hospital, which is set to become the country's largest hospital.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.