Good afternoon. Last week’s elections are starting to look like an overall victory for the “sofa party”: according to the provincial-level results available from six provinces and the city of Maputo, close to 60% of registered voters chose not to vote at all. The highest level of abstention, just under 72%, was witnessed in Nampula province, which has historically low rates of participation. Only in the city of Maputo, at 37%, was the abstention rate more than a few percentage points below 50%.
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It is true that the abstention rate will have been exaggerated by the creation of so-called “ghost voters”, the inflation of registered voter numbers in order to assign those votes to ruling party Frelimo as part of its vote-rigging tactics. But the levels of over-registration detected so far would not be enough to change the overall picture. Participation in this election does not seem particularly better than in 2019, when just over 49% of registered voters did not vote.
