Mozambique's Guebuza on track for landslide re-election win

Oct 30, 2009, 16:26 GMT

Maputo - Partial results from Mozambique's presidential and parliamentary elections released by Friday showed President Armando Guebuza and his ruling party Frelimo poised to be re-elected by a landslide.

Preliminary results released by the National Electoral Commission (CNE) from Wednesday's vote show Guebuza polling 74 per cent in the presidential ballot, or 536,440 votes, based on results from 18 per cent of polling stations.

A new challenger, Daviz Simango, mayor of the port city of Beira, was in second place with 17 per cent, or 121,543 votes , and longtime opposition leader Afonso Dhlakama was trailing in third place with 9 per cent, or 64,893 votes.

In all 13 constituencies, Guebuza's Frelimo also enjoyed a comfortable margin over Dhlakamo's Renamo and Simango's Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM).

Former guerrilla group Renamo, which fought a 16-year civil war against independence party Frelimo between 1976 and 1992, appeared to be the biggest loser in the country's fourth multi-party polls.

The MDM, which was formed by ex-Renamo members last year and was controversially barred from contesting all but four constituencies, had, so far, outperformed Renamo in all four.

The emergence of a new opposition party appeared to have bolstered Frelimo, which was also leading for the first time in the longtime opposition stronghold of Sofala province in central Mozambique.

While no figures were yet available for turnout, participation was believed to have been high compared to 2004, when only 36 percent of the electorate voted.

Frelimo party, a former Marxist liberation movement that freed the country from Portuguese rule in 1975, has won every election since 1994.

In recent years the government has embraced free-market policies and the country of around 20 million people, one of the world's poorest, has become one of Africa's success stories.

A surge of foreign investment in gas, coal, hydropower, mineral sands and other sectors has fuelled strong gross domestic product GDP growth, which is expected to come in at over 5 per cent this year.

Some 10.3 million Mozambicans were eligible to vote for a president, 250-seat national assembly and 10 new provincial assemblies.