The incumbent Lourenco and his Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) have been declared winner of Wednesday’s presidential and parliamentary election with 51.17% of the votes.
The win extends the MPLA’s 47-year profitable streak and comes amid rising disenchantment with the occasion and state of affairs within the southern African nation. Only about 6.4 million of the 14 million Angolans who registered to vote did so, in response to the electoral fee.
The principal opposition occasion, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Adalberto Costa Junior, took 43.95% of the votes.
Civil society campaigner António Soares Gonga was among the many dissatisfied voters who reacted to MPLA’s win.
“As usual, the MPLA is doing everything to perpetuate itself in power. With the exception of the ruling party, no other citizen is happy with the results. The UNITA has become the only possible hope for the Angolan people. Angola hoped to breathe new air, with less corruption and poverty. But the fight continues and one day victory will come,” he advised CNN.
Election specialists predicted a good race though opposition candidates hardly ever win in Angola. Costa Junior of the UNITA occasion is a charismatic and widespread chief who loved reputation among the many nation’s youth, lots of whom are disaffected and unemployed.
The MPLA has dominated Angola because the nation gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Lourenço, 68, who has ruled Angola since 2017, claimed to have constructed “a new Angola,” however throughout election campaigning Costa Junior, 60, blamed the MPLA’s grip on energy for lots of the nation’s issues, together with poverty, inflation, and corruption.
Angola is the second-biggest oil producer in Africa and emerged from the wreckage of a 27-year civil warfare to grow to be one of many continent’s main financial gamers. But the nation’s huge oil wealth doesn’t trickle right down to lots of its impoverished residents.
Lourenço was the hand-picked successor to former President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who dominated the nation for 38 years and have become, alongside together with his household, enormously rich.
CNN’s Manveena Suri contributed to this report.
