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Fixing the results on Election Day – filling the polls or changing the vote counts – has gotten more difficult in recent years, said Mathias Hounkpe, a political governance specialist at the Open Society Initiative West Africa. As a result, politicians are changing their tactics, he said.
“Little by little, those in power are realizing that it is increasingly difficult to deceive,” Hounkpe said in an online debate. “They use the means they have to keep the political space under control.”
In French-speaking West Africa, civic space is shrinking, so citizens trying to hold their governments to account face repressive laws, arrests and sometimes death, according to a report to be released by the nonprofit organization. for profit Civicus.
Case in point: the recent deadly clashes in Guinea over the new constitution promoted by the country’s first democratically elected president, Alpha Condé.
His success in maneuvering to stay in power is partly the fault of Western negligence, said Cellou Dalein Diallo, the leader of the Guinean opposition.
“Europeans are less vigilant and Americans, with the arrival of Trump, are less demanding when it comes to democracy and human rights,” Diallo said on a recent campaign trip to Dakar, Senegal, where a large diaspora lives. Guinean. .
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo issued a statement last week on “the next elections in Africa”, warning that “repression and intimidation have no place in democracies.” But many Africans commented on social media that such a terse and general statement about the continent, rather than specific countries, was evidence that there is little interest on the part of President Trump’s administration, who denigrated African countries with an epithet. memorable in 2018.
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