Two wins for incumbency

Two very different elections were held at the weekend, but both were clear victories for the incumbents.

First was Saturday in Gabon. You might remember Gabon from the military coup about a year and a half ago that overthrew the Bongo dynasty, which had ruled the country since 1967 – initially as a dictatorship, later through dubious (at best) elections. Shortly after crediting himself with 64.3% of the vote in a presidential election, Ali Bongo Ondimba was removed and placed under arrest (he was subsequently released), apparently with widespread public approval.

The new leader, General Brice Oligui Nguema (who is Bongo’s cousin), promised fair elections and a return to civilian rule. But as so often happens he decided that the country’s welfare and his own would both best be served by him staying in power. So while the promise of an election was kept, as I’ve remarked before, “an election where the incumbent military dictator is a candidate is not an exercise in democracy.”

It’s therefore no surprise that provisional results show the general winning with just over 90% of the vote. The other seven candidates were unable to muster 10% between them; Bongo’s former prime minister, Alain-Claude Bilie-By-Nze, did best with 3.2%. More serious opponents such as opposition leader Albert Ondo Ossa and trade union leader Jean Rémy Yama had been prevented from running. Turnout was reported as 70.4%.

Oligui Nguema now has a seven-year term in which to remake Gabonese politics. Despite the unfair election, the optimistic tone of news reports is not entirely unfounded: certainly Gabon seems to be on a quite different track to the military regimes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which have postponed elections indefinitely and rely on Russian support.

The following day, Ecuador went to the polls for the second round of its presidential election (see report on the first round here). Incumbent Daniel Noboa was seeking election for what would be his first full term; he won the job in a special election called when his predecessor Guillermo Lasso dissolved parliament in 2023, but only for the completion of Lasso’s term.

The first round was very close: Noboa, who is from the right, led by less than 17,000 votes from the left’s Luisa González, 44.2% to 44.0%. The largest share of the rest went to Leonidas Iza of Pachakutik, an Indigenous-rights party, which endorsed González for the runoff, seemingly putting her in a strong position.

But on Sunday Noboa was untroubled. Figures are apparently not final, but it’s reported that he won by more than a million votes, with 55.6% to González’s 44.4%. González has claimed fraud but has not produced any evidence and has not been supported by many of her allies; Nicolas Forsans, an expert on the region, describes her claims as “more political theatre than a real challenge to the integrity of the vote.”

Ecuador is beset by chronic drug-related violence, against which Noboa’s authoritarian methods have so far achieved only limited success. Voters, evidently unwilling to return to the leftist era associated with former president Rafael Correa, have now given him a mandate to press ahead. But with no majority in the legislature (where Pachakutik holds the balance of power between right and left) he is unlikely to have an easy time of it.