The European Union’s Election Observation Mission to Mozambique hopes that the results of the 9 October general elections, from all the polling stations, will be published.
At a Maputo press conference on Tuesday, reporters asked the head of the mission, Laura Cereza, if the EU would take the same attitude towards Mozambique that it had taken towards Venezuela.
Both the EU and the United States have described as fraudulent the recent Venezuelan election, in which President Nicolas Maduro was declared re-elected with an alleged 52 per cent of the vote.
The main reason for rejecting this result was that the Venezuelan Electoral Council failed to publish the full results, polling station by polling station (the polling station results published by the opposition suggested that its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, had won a convincing victory).
So would the EU Mission apply the same criteria to Mozambique as had been applied to Venezuela?
Cereza replied that the Mission wants the Mozambican National Elections Commission (CNE) to publish all the polling station results sheets (“editais”) on the CNE website.
She claimed that the EU had made this recommendation after the previous general elections in 2019.
But it has never happened. The Mozambican anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP) pointed out, in a Tuesday statement, that “the last time the Mozambican CNE published detailed voting tallies and records of each polling station was in 2009. The tallies of 2014 were given to the international community, but not published in Mozambique. No detailed tallies have been available since then”.
Furthermore, the CNE has always reserved the right to change results in secret, without giving any justification for these changes.
The Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, admits to making changes in the results, but does not explain them.
Thus the Council corrected some of the fraud in the 2023 municipal elections. It took three municipal councils away from the ruling Frelimo Party, and gave them to the main opposition, Renamo. In Maputo and the adjacent city of Matola it took tens of thousands of votes from Frelimo and gave them to Renamo.
But this still gave Frelimo a majority of seats on the Maputo and Matola councils, even though a parallel count of the votes showed that Renamo had won in both cities.
The parallel count showed that Renamo had won 55 per cent of the vote in Maputo and 59 per cent in Matola. If the Constitutional Council disagreed with this count it did not say so. It never gave its own version of the polling station counts.
CIP noted that the CNE, in a November 2023 statement, said it did not check the polling station editais itself, but merely accepted the tallies of the district elections commission. However, a judge in the Nhlamankulo district court in Maputo found it proven that the district STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) had introduced fake editais which granted victory to Frelimo.
CIP wonders whether the EU (and the US) “will apply the same standards to Mozambique as they have in Venezuela”.
Asked to comment on the fraud in last year’s municipal elections, Cereza declined to do so, on the grounds that the EU did not have an observation mission for those elections.
She said that the EU mission has a mandate “to make an objective, rigorous and exhaustive assessment of all aspects of the elections”. She stressed that the mission is independent of all Mozambican and EU institutions.
The observers, she added, “do not interfere in any way in the elections, and cannot alter or correct defects, or offer assistance. The Mission does not legitimise the elections or validate the results”.
On Friday, a group of 32 long term observers will deploy to all the provinces. Shortly before voting day, 74 short term observers will join the mission, as will diplomats from EU member states accredited in Mozambique and a delegation of deputies from the European parliament.
The Mission will make a declaration with its preliminary findings two days after the elections. A final report will be issued within three months of the elections.
AIM
