CAR: List of Presidential Candidates Issued

Central Africa  |  11.14.10   By PoliticsAfrica Staff

The Central African Republic’s electoral body has paved the way for a battle between President Francois Bozize and the man he ousted in a 2003 coup when it approved the candidates for polls in January 2011.

A spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), Rigobert Vondo, said that the body had approved of four of six candidates who want to run in January’s presidential poll.

They include Bozize and Ange-Felix Patasse, who ruled from 1998 until 2003, when Bozize, his former chief of staff, overthrew him in a coup.

Bozize was then elected president in 2005.

The other two candidates whose applications were accepted were former defence minister Jean Jacques Demafouth, who became a rebel but has signed peace accords, and Jean Innocent Wilite, the candidate of a small political party.

The dossiers of all four candidates wil be forwarded to the Constitutional Court for validation, Vondo said in a statement read on national radio in the very poor, landlocked nation.

Vondo said that these candidates “have fulfilled the conditions required by the electoral code,” without explaining why the two other candidates, Cleophas Azouroute, who is close to Bozize, and Lambert Kouet Fode, a businessman, were rejected.

A leading opposition politician, Martin Ziguele, prime minister from 2001 to 2003 and president of the powerful Movement for the Liberation of the Centrafrican People (MLPC), did not appear on the list.

Ziguele presented his candidacy just after the official date, but he argued his case was legitimate as the closing date limit had been brought forward.

The timetable for putting in candidatures had originally been from November 8 to December 10, but in October the closing date was brought forward to November 8, after a meeting Bozize held with politicians and representatives of civil society.

Some opposition parties then protested.

Ziguele finished in second place in the election of 2005 with enough votes to take Bozize into a second round, which the incumbent president won.

After two postponements and much political haggling, the first round of the next presidential election has been fixed for January 23, with a second round, if needed, on March 20

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