Angola votes as ruling party seeks to extend 47-year rule

AP | Angolans are voting in an election in which President João Lourenço is seeking a second term and longtime opposition party National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) is trying to unseat the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party which has held power for 47 years.

Some voters lined up at dawn Wednesday, 2 hours before polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time.

Lourenço and opposition candidate Adalberto Costa Júnior of UNITA, cast their ballots in Luanda, the capital city on the Atlantic Ocean.

About 14 million of the country’s more than 33 million people have registered to vote. In the previous election in 2017, the turnout was 57 percent of those who registered.

Ordinarily busy marketplaces and street stalls have been closed to encourage people to go to the polls and the government has urged all employers to allow workers to have time to vote.

At the more than 26,400 polling stations across the country and abroad, the MPLA, has 53,000 representatives to monitor the voting and counting. UNITA has not announced how it will monitor results but it has called on its supporters to sit at polling stations after voting to observe the counting and posting of the tallies.

The election is being watched by about 2,000 international observers including from the European Union, the African Union, the Southern African Development Community and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.

As the threat of COVID-19 has reduced, people are permitted to vote without face masks.