Burkina Faso Heads to Polls

West Africa  |  11.21.10   By PoliticsAfrica Staff

Burkina Faso holds presidential elections today, but the winner seems a foregone conclusion.

President Blaise Compaore, a 59-year-old former army captain who first came to power through a bloody coup in 1987 and has held on to it ever since, faces a fragmented opposition unable to mount a unified campaign to effectively fight him at the polls.

One of the poorest countries in the world, landlocked Burkina Faso has suffered five coups since independence from France in 1960.

Long accused of helping fuel armed conflicts across West Africa, Compaore has in recent years recast himself as a peacemaker, playing a key role in helping to end conflicts in Ivory Coast, Guinea and Togo.

He faces six challengers — all from small opposition parties, though one is running as an independent.

Among them is lawyer Stanislas Benewinde Sankara, who gained only 5 percent of the last vote in 2005, compared to more than 80 percent for Compaore.

Halidou Ouedraogo, a lawyer and political analyst who helped push for key political reforms in 2002, said the problem with the country’s opposition is that it is split into some 150 parties.

Many of them, he said, “have the same ideology, but they have not been able to join together into a single opposition force.”

Burkina Faso is plagued by high rates of unemployment and illiteracy, and most people rely on subsistence agriculture.

The country’s main cash crop is cotton.

When a wave of multi-partisanship swept the African continent in the early 1990s, Burkina Faso held elections and Compaore won two seven-year terms in 1991 and 1998.

A constitutional amendment in 2002 instituted two-term limits of five years each, but Compaore and his supporters argued the new laws could not be applied retroactively, and so he ran again in 2005 winning about 80 percent of the vote.

If he wins the Sunday’s ballot, it should be his last term — his second since the constitution was changed.

However, ruling party officials say they want to alter the constitution again so he can run as many times as he wants — something opposition leaders are vehemently against.

Just over 3 million of the country’s 16 million people are registered to vote, and will cast ballots at around 12,600 polling stations nationwide.

Preliminary results are expected by November 25 

Share it