The President of Benin Patrice Talon will have two opponents in the presidential election in April, only three candidacy files out of the twenty submitted having been accepted, the Electoral Commission announced on Friday February 12.
The accepted files were the only ones to be complete, explained the Electoral Commission, citing in particular problems at the level of the number of sponsorships of elected officials.
Major opposition figures are in exile or sentenced to ineligibility sentences prohibiting them from running, this small West African country, long seen as a model of democracy, having recently taken an authoritarian turn.
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Patrice Talon, a cotton magnate who came to power in 2016, will face in the polls former minister Alassane Soumano of the Force cauris party for an emerging Benin (FCBE), considered the largest political formation of the opposition, and a figure dissident among opponents of the president, Corentin Kohoué.
The opposition denounces a ballot locked by the outgoing president, highlighting in particular a new provision of the electoral law which requires each candidate to be sponsored by sixteen mayors or deputies.
Patrice Talon
"did not want to take any risk"
and
"he chose to select his opponents from among his allies and refused the competition to candidates capable of beating him at the ballot box"
, accused Joel Aïvo, candidate for union of a party of the opposition whose file was rejected for
"lack of sponsorship"
.
On the contrary, supporters of Patrice Talon claimed that the conditions were in place for a fair election.
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Members of the opposition warned on Tuesday a United Nations representative, visiting Benin, that the conditions imposed by Patrice Talon's government could undermine the credibility of the election.
In the legislative elections of April 2019, none of the opposition parties had been authorized to present a list and, at the end of the municipal elections of April 2020, boycotted by some opponents, only six mayors of this movement were elected.
At the time of his election in 2016, Patrice Talon had said he wanted to serve a single term, before retracting and announcing his candidacy in mid-January.
Candidates whose files have been rejected can lodge an appeal with the Constitutional Court, which will publish the final list of candidates for election in ten days.