Accused by the Central African opposition of wanting to remain president for life, Faustin-Archange Touadéra could at least run for a third term, after the broad victory of the "yes" in favor of a new constitutional project, Monday, August 7, in a referendum.

In the July 30 election, voters voted 95.27% in favor and 4.73% against, with a turnout that stood at 61.10%, said Monday the president of the National Elections Authority (ANE), Mathias Morouba.

The vote, the outcome of which was not in doubt, was boycotted by the main opposition parties, civil society organizations and armed rebel groups.

These "provisional" results must be ratified by the Constitutional Court, which is due to announce the final results on 27 August.

Elected in 2016, Faustin-Archange Touadéra was re-elected in 2020 after an election disrupted by armed rebel groups and marred by accusations of fraud.

With this new fundamental law removing the limit on the number of presidential terms, and their extension from five to seven years, no obstacle prevents the 66-year-old head of state from running for the presidency a third time in 2025. Re-elected, he could reach the age of 16 at the head of this country of 5.4 million inhabitants, whose territory is roughly equivalent to those of France and Benelux combined.

The Central African opposition did not wait for the results of the election to accuse Faustin-Archange Touadéra of wanting to remain "president for life" of one of the poorest countries in the world, all under the protection of mercenaries from the Russian private security company Wagner, deployed in the Central African Republic since 2018.

"It's a vaudeville, a comedy (...) We all saw that people did not go to vote and it does not reflect the will of the Central African people," Crépin Mboli-Goumba, the coordinator of the Republican Bloc for the Defense of the Constitution (BRDC), told AFP.

Referendum opponents harassed

On September 22, 2022, Faustin-Archange Touadéra suffered a legal setback when the Constitutional Court annulled a decree creating a committee to draft a new constitution. The court had invoked, inter alia, the fact that the Senate, the upper house of Parliament provided for in the previous constitution, had still not been established.

In January 2023, the government automatically retired the president of the Constitutional Court, Danièle Darlan, the main architect of the invalidation, while the United Hearts Movement (MCU) of President Touadéra, arch-majority in the National Assembly with the support of satellite parties, occupied the space by multiplying demonstrations to castigate the supreme court and demand a new constitution by referendum.

Central African government officials threatened and harassed opponents of the referendum, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), and authorities banned an opposition demonstration in the capital.

According to Human Rights Watch, officials from the Russian embassy in the Central African Republic visited the former president of the Constitutional Court to seek advice on how to amend the constitution.

Moscow to the rescue

The country has been the scene of a deadly civil war, which erupted in 2013 when a Muslim-dominated rebel alliance, the Seleka, toppled President Francois Bozizé. The latter has mobilized predominantly Christian and animist self-defense militias, the anti-balakas, to try to regain power in a country where 71% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.

See also"Central Africans are tired of war and want to think about the future"

Thousands of civilians were massacred to the climax of the war in 2016 and the UN accused Seleka and anti-balakas of crimes against humanity, despite the presence of a large peacekeeping force of peacekeepers.

In 2020, the most powerful of the rebel groups, which then occupied more than two-thirds of the territory, came together to launch a major offensive on Bangui.

Faustin-Archange Touadéra called on Moscow and Rwandan soldiers to rescue his destitute army, and hundreds of mercenaries from the private security company Wagner came to reinforce hundreds of others already present since 2018.

They saved the regime and drove the rebels out of most of the territory they occupied. The latter now carry out guerrilla operations.

With AFP

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