President of Comoros wins fourth term in a contentious poll

Comoros President Azali Assoumani has won another term in office, but the opposition says the election was not fair.

Ceni said he won with 63% of the votes.

However, not many people came to vote because the opposition did not participate – only 16% of the population voted in the presidential election.

Opposition candidates said that people put extra votes in the ballot boxes for Mr Assoumani and that the polls closed too soon, according to Reuters news agency.

Mr Assoumani’s team said no to what the opposition is saying.

Six people ran for president in an election on 14 January in a group of islands in the Indian Ocean.

“We can’t say anything about the outcome because there wasn’t an election,” said Mouigni Baraka Said Soilihi, who is running against Mr. Assoumani, according to Reuters.

Poll observers from other countries said that the voting process was mostly fair, even though the opposition reported some problems.

The election commission says that 189,000 people could have voted, but only 55,259 actually did – that’s only 16% of the people who could have voted.

The voter turnout was low because some opposition candidates asked people not to vote. As a result, some voters only voted in the governor elections and didn’t participate in the other elections.

Over 330,000 people signed up to vote out of a total of 836,000 people in the area.

Mr Assoumani used to be in the military and took control by force in 1999. He then won the first election in 2002.

He stopped doing politics in 2006, but then he won the presidential election in 2016.

He was allowed to run for president for a fourth time because the rules about how many times a president can run were changed in 2018. This caused many people in the country to protest.

Mr Assoumani’s time as leader has been filled with arguments, as some people say he has put his rivals in jail or made them leave the country.

He leads the African Union right now.