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Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s party won overwhelmingly in the country’s first regional elections held over the weekend, according to official results released on Wednesday, in a vote that was boycotted by the opposition.
The longtime leader had called elections in part to defuse a separatist insurgency in the English-speaking west.
A 24,000-member electoral college made up of municipal councilors and traditional chiefs voted to fill the seats of 900 regional councilors: 90 for each of the country’s 10 regions.
The ruling party won in nine of the 10 regions, while the tenth was won by a party with the presidential majority, according to the results compiled by AFP region by region of the Ministry of the Interior and Elecam, the body in charge of organizing the vote. .
The results were not a surprise, as the municipal councilors with the highest share of votes were overwhelmingly from the ruling party.
In the Anglophone regions of the northwest and southwest, which have been plagued by bloody conflict between the army and separatist groups for almost four years, Biya’s party, the People’s Democratic Movement (DPRK), was the only one in dispute.
The two main opposition parties, Maurice Kamto’s Movement for the Cameroon Renaissance (MRC) and the Social Democratic Front (SDF) had boycotted the polls.
Kamto has organized protests against Biya in recent months, claiming that holding elections before finding a solution to the secessionist conflict in the Anglophone regions amounts to supporting partition.
The military has been fighting the secessionists since 2017, and both sides are accused of abuses against civilians.
The government had presented these first regional elections as a historic step to complete the decentralization of the country’s power and resolve the Anglophone crisis, even if they were first established in the 1996 constitution.
Biya dusted off the measures after coming under intense pressure from the international community for the uprising that has so far claimed 3,000 lives and forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homes.
Biya, who has ruled the country for 38 years, has faced an unprecedented wave of street protests against her regime in recent years.
On top of that, the extreme north of the country has been repeatedly targeted by jihadists.
