President Ouattara, 83, to seek fourth term in Côte d'Ivoire

Veteran Côte d’Ivoire President Alassane Ouattara has said he will seek a fourth term in the west African country, as tensions rise over the exclusion of many opposition candidates. Ouattara, 83, has led Côte d’Ivoire since 2011. He is described as the overwhelming favourite to win the 25 October vote.

Alassane Ouattara announced that he would be a candidate for re-election in a filmed address on Tuesday evening.

Ouattara had already been nominated by his ruling Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP) party, but he waited until this week to confirm he would run.

“I am a candidate because the constitution of our country allows me to run for another term and my health permits it,” he said, adding that the world’s top cocoa producer was “facing unprecedented security, economic, and monetary challenges, the management of which requires experience”.

For the past decade Ouattara has steered Côte d’Ivoire to relative stability, in a turbulent region which has seen a rash of military coups. Yet critics accuse him of tightening his grip on power.

The opposition already argues a fourth Ouattara term would be unconstitutional.

Opponents have also accused the authorities of using courts to exclude opponents, as the two main opposition parties have had their leaders barred from running for the election. They launched a joint campaign to demand their reinstatement.

The government insists the judiciary acts independently.

The African People’s Party of Ivory Coast (PPACI), led by former president Laurent Gbagbo, and the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), the country’s largest opposition force, headed by former international banker Tidjane Thiam, have formed an alliance.

Gbagbo, his former right-hand man Charles Ble Goude, and ex-prime minister Guillaume Soro have been struck from the electoral register due to criminal convictions.

Thiam was also excluded by the judiciary over nationality issues.

“The announcement made today by Mr Ouattara constitutes a violation of our constitution and a new attack on democracy,” Thiam said in a statement.

Pascal Affi N’Guessan, who will run to unseat Ouattara for the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), called it “a candidacy as illegal as his third”.

Critics had already questioned the legality of Ouattara’s third mandate as the law limited him to two, until the adoption of a new constitution in 2016 reset the term counter to zero.

And the opposition boycotted the 2020 vote when Ouattara won by a landslide, with at least 85 people killed in the ensuing unrest.

Ouattara entered politics when Côte d’Ivoire’s founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, appointed him to chair a body on economic recovery in the midst of an economic crisis. Then as Houphouet-Boigny’s health worsened, Ouattara assumed increasing responsibility for the country’s affairs.

When the president died in December 1993, Ouattara was embroiled in a brief power struggle with Henri Konan Bédié, the speaker of parliament, and then left Côte d’Ivoire to join the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In 1995, he joined the Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party and planned on running as their presidential candidate, but he was barred from doing so following new laws requiring both parents of a candidate to be of Ivorian birth and for the candidate to have lived continuously in the country prior to an election.

He was barred again from polls in 2000 on the same grounds.

Two years later, a failed coup led to a civil war that divided the country into rebel-held and predominantly Muslim north, where Ouattara drew much of his support, and the government-controlled Christian-majority south.

Ouattara was subjected to violence during the unrest, and left the country again, but returned to run in the 2010 election, that he won.

But then-president Gbagbo refuse to concede defeat, which led to more unrest. More than 3,000 people were killed in fighting, before Ouattara became president in 2011.

Gbagbo was acquitted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague but still has a conviction in Ivory Coast stemming from the post-election crisis that ended his rule.

(with AFP)