Madagascar's president wins election

The Associated PressPublished: December 9, 2006
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar: Madagascar's incumbent president has won elections in the Indian Ocean island, officials said Saturday.

Marc Ravalomanana beat 13 other challengers in the Dec. 3 election, winning 55.1 percent of the vote with results from 96 percent of polling stations, elections officials said.

The final 35,000 votes were expected to be counted by Sunday morning, but were not expected to change the result, said Charles Rabemananjara, minister of the interior.

"We have to wait for the decision of the Constitutional High Court but as far as the ministry is concerned, this election is over," he said.

Ravalomanana, a charismatic dairy tycoon know as "the Milkman," needed to win at least 50 percent of the vote to avoid a run-off. His nearest rival, Lahiniriko Jean, the former head of the National Assembly, trailed behind with 11.4 percent of the vote.

The election was Madagascar's first since voting five years ago split the country. In 2001, fighting broke out after former President Didier Ratsiraka refused to accept defeat by Ravalomanana. After months of rival governments in two capitals and low-level fighting between their loyalists, Ratsiraka fled to France in June 2002.

Election observers said this year's ballot had gone well but raised concerns about the country's system of requiring candidates to provide their own ballots.

Earlier this week, representatives for Jean said they would not accept a first-round victory for Ravalomanana because of problems with voter registration and the electoral list.

But Serge Ramilison, director of territorial administration who is overseeing the vote count, said: "This election is finished. Ravalomanana will be the next president."

On Thursday, the police began searching for opposition politician Pety Rakotoniaina, wanted for holding an illegal gathering the day before campaigning ended, among other charges. Rakotoniaina supported Gen. Randrianafidisoa, who uses one name only and is known as Gen. Fidy — a candidate who called for a military overthrow of the government two weeks before the vote.

The government is offering a reward of US$50,000 (€37,000) for information or assistance leading to the arrest of Randrianafidisoa, who has been on the run since his coup attempt failed to garner much support

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IMF Executive Board Discusses the First Assessment of Eligible Countries under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

On December 21, 2005 the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established the list of countries that qualify for debt relief from the Fund under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Debt relief delivery, which could start as soon as January 3, 2005, is now conditional on getting the consents of all the contributors to the Subsidy Account of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Trust, whose contributions help finance the Initiative. The MDRI will deliver debt relief from the Fund to qualifying members countries with an annual per capita income at or below US$380, and to countries above the threshold that have reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The implementation of the MDRI will reduce the external debt burden of a number of the world's poorest countries and will provide additional resources to help them reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Background The Executive Board appro...
Read more

Oil’s chaotic collapse deepens; stocks drop worldwide

Image
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more