Talk:Elections in Djibouti

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Africa: Djibouti

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Removed text

I removed the below because it is unreferenced and sounds like a news report, leading me to suspect it was cut and pasted from a copyrighted source. This is interesting coverage, but would need to be rewritten. -- Beland (talk) 01:07, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

February 2008 elections The voters of Djibouti, a small (pop. c 750,000) and poor but strategically significant country in the Horn of Africa, went to the polls on 8 February 2008 to elect representatives to the 65 seat national assembly. Candidates are elected to five year terms in multi-seat constituencies. The three-party opposition alliance, the Union for a Democratic Alternative (UAD), which urged its supporters to stay at home and boycott the elections (as it did in the case of the Presidential elections in 2005, called the elections ‘a charade’. In the last legislative elections, in 2003, the UAD gained 38 per cent of the vote but not a single seat in the 65 seat parliament. This time – as in the case of the 2005 presidential elections - they advocated a boycott. ‘In practice, this is a one-party system’, said Ismael Guedi Hared, one of the leaders of the UAD. He accused the government of trying to suppress the democratic opposition and called for the introduction of proportional representation. He also warned of ‘growing social discontent’ with the political status quo and with the economic and social problems faced in both rural and urban areas.

Turnout was reported to be 72 per cent, although this figure was contested by the opposition UAD. Minister of the Interior, Yacin Elmi Bou, declared that 103,463 people had voted for the Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) – the party of the president, Ismael Omar Guelleh – and that just over 6,500 (6.2 per cent) had returned spoiled or blank ballot papers. But it seems that the relatively low abstention rate was due to the fact that almost a quarter of voters had ‘disappeared’ from the electoral roll.

Elections ‘a farce’?

The opposition claimed that many of the registered voters supporting the opposition did not vote. ‘For us’, said Ismail Guedi Hared, ‘what happened… was not remotely like an election. It was a farce’. He declared that the government ‘remains allergic to any political freedom, one of the basic facets of human rights’; and Suleiman Farah Lodon, leader of the Movement for Democratic Renewal (one of the three parties comprising the UAD), argued that ‘if these elections were free and transparent, the opposition would win.

Prime Minister, Dileita Mohamed Dileita, who heads the list of the People’s Rally for Progress RPP) – a member of the UMP - said that proportional representation risked ‘upsetting the tribal balance’ in Djibouti. In fact, under the present system, the national assembly has managed to represent both major tribal/clan groups, the Issas and the Afars, although there is certainly significant support for the opposition UAD among the Afars, who in previous periods have embarked on an armed struggle to gain more effective representation. Tribal/clan divisions do, therefore, provide one basis for social and political division within the country.

Other social divisions include those between the urban population of Djibouti Town - where a massive programme of port development is underway which is certain to attract increasing numbers of Djiboutians s well as foreigners from neighbouring countries, including (notably at the present time, in the aftermath of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and growing conflict there) refugees from Somalia – and the rural population, where many, including Afars, survive largely from subsistence pastoralism and rain fed agriculture.

Electoral system in 2013

According to Adam Carr, not only the 13 seats in the national electoral district are awarded proportionally, but also the seats in the five territorial districts are awarded proportionally.--Bancki (talk) 10:28, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Inter-Parliamentary Union tells about a mixed system: the first list gets 80% of the seats, the 20% remaining seats are awarded proprotionally to the other lists >10% of the votes, but this doesn't fit with the results given by Adam Carr.--Bancki (talk) 19:54, 1 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]