President Paul Kagame has won 99% of the vote in provisional results from Monday’s presidential election in Rwanda, electoral authorities said, an outcome that was widely expected as the country’s long-time ruler aims to extend this three-decade grip on power.
Kagame’s opponents — Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and independent candidate Philippe Mpayimana — were collectively getting under one percent of the vote in provisional results.
The result mirrored the outcome in 2017, when Kagame took nearly 99% of the vote.
Final results are expected by 27 July, although they could be announced sooner.
The 66-year-old Kagame, who has held power since the end of the country’s genocide in 1994, was running virtually unopposed. Two of his stronger critics were blocked from running for high office.
Thirty years of reconstruction
This election was really “about how far Rwanda has come since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi,” Phil Clark, a professor of international politics at SOAS University of London, told RFI English’s podcast ‘Spotlight on Africa’.
“If you look at the way that Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the ruling party, have been campaigning for this election, it’s very much been on their record in helping to rebuild the country after the genocide.”
“They’re seeing it very much as an election on Kagame’s record in terms of rebuilding the country after the genocide,” Clark said. “That’s a message that’s been pushed by the ruling party.”
Read more on RFI English
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