Mauritanian coup leader wins election
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania - Nearly a year after seizing power in a military putsch that ousted Mauritania’s first freely elected leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz won the presidency yesterday in a landslide vote his opponents decried as a fraudulent “electoral coup.’’
The poll was officially held to restore civilian rule, but critics say little is likely to change in this moderate Islamic republic on the western edge of the sand-swept Sahara: Power will remain in the hands of the 52-year-old retired general who spent his life in the military and resigned only to legitimize his grasp on it by running for president.
“We’ve gone backward to an era of dictatorship,’’ said Boubacar Ould Messaoud, who heads an organization that fights a tradition of slavery that continues here despite being banned.
“Aziz is no democrat,’’ Messaoud said. “He is a soldier, and like all soldiers, he should stay in his barracks. There will be no difference between this regime and the junta’’ he ruled.
Aziz, however, styles himself as a defender of democracy who staged a coup only to prevent a return to the country’s epoch of repressive military rule - which he helped end with an earlier putsch, in 2005.
The final result announced late yesterday by Interior Minister Mohamed Ould Rzeizim showed Aziz with 52 percent of the vote, a majority that enables him to avoid a runoff. The count must be confirmed by the constitutional court to be valid. Rzeizim said Parliament speaker Messaoud Ould Boulkheir came in second with 16 percent, while veteran opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah was third with 13 percent.
The main opposition candidates rejected the final outcome even before it was announced, saying the count had been “prefabricated.’’
