Beninois president comfortably re-elected
As expected, Beninois president Patrice Talon has won a second term in office following elections on 11th April. Provisional results from the electoral commission (Commission Électorale Nationale Autonome du Bénin, CENA) show that he secured 86.37% of the vote from a voter turnout of 50.17%. Full results are expected on 20 April.
Significance – Five years is a long time in politics
Benin has in the past stood out as an example of stable democracy in the region. This tradition continued with the election of Talon in 2016. One campaign pledge in that election was to change the constitution to only allow presidents to serve one term in office however this failed to gain support when it came to parliament and so was scrapped.
Contemporaneously, there was a descent into what has been labelled as autocracy by some opponents. Opposition leaders have been jailed or forced into exile on seemingly spurious charges. Many of these convictions have come via the Cour de Repression des Infractions Economiques et du Terrorisme (CRIET), established by Talon in 2018. The situation in the country attracted the attention from the African Court of Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) with Benin eventually withdrawing from the court’s charter.
Legislative elections in 2019 ended with all 83 seats being taken by parliamentarians loyal to Talon. Added to legislation that called for any presidential candidate to be backed by at least 10% of MPs and mayors, Talon was effectively able to curate his opponents. The only two candidates cleared to stand were Alassane Soumanou and Corentin Kohoue, little known figures who many saw as soft candidates.
The build-up to the poll was characterised by a week of opposition protests across the country with two people reportedly being killed by security forces in the city of Save. These protests were significantly muted compared to what was witnessed around the 2019 legislative polls and could speak to a growing apathy amongst voters, particularly those supporting the opposition. A matter of days before the poll, a senior judge within CRIET fled the country after resigning because he was being pressured to convict opposition leaders without any evidence.
Outlook – Back to business
In the short term, there are unlikely to be any legal challenges from the two defeated candidates and the excluded candidates have little or no legal agency to contest the results. Domestic observer groups have said that “attempts to pressurise, intimidate, threaten, corrupt or harass voters were observed across the entire country”. Whilst less than the 66% seen in 2016, the turnout is higher than many may have expected and shows that there is still a good level of public support for Talon.
In the longer term, we can expect the passage of legislation that will strengthen the position of Talon. He is unencumbered by any significant opposition and the country’s economy has survived the Covid-19 pandemic particularly well given growth of 2.3% in 2020 that is expected to rebound to 5% in 2021. There will also be a continued promotion of the headline USD 15 billion Government Action Plan that was launched in 2016 but has so far failed to yield the desired results[1]. Benin’s main investment promotion agency, L’Agence de Promotion des Investissements et des Exportations (APIEX), is housed at the presidency and so we can expect to see Talon himself to continue to front many of these efforts. Also noteworthy is that CRIET (assumed to be under the control of Talon), is the agency responsible for international dispute resolution.
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[1] There are accusations that the plan is being used to hand out contracts to political allies, more relevant given that many of the jailed or exiled opposition members were also heavily involved in the private sector.
*Photo credit: Patrice Talon, Yanickfolly CC
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