Bashir is unlikely to gain majority in first round of Sudan’s elections: Carter
February 11, 2010 (JUBA) –The presidential elections in April will likely go into a second round as no candidate will be able to achieve the 51% majority required including president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir, former US president Jimmy Carter said today.
Carter, who founded the Carter Centre which is monitoring the elections, said he believed there was a “high likelihood” the presidential contest would need a second round.
“If no one gets an absolute majority, then there will be a run-off election in May and I think that’s a high likelihood,” he told reporters during a trip to south Sudan.
“We don’t know yet whether al-Bashir can get a majority in the beginning round. If not, which I think is likely, there will be a run-off between him and the second person who gets the most votes,” Carter added.
Last month, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) announced that it will not nominate any of its members to run against South Sudan president Salva Kiir and urged his party the Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) to do the same and withdraw Yasir Arman’s candidacy. However, the ex-Southern rebel group rejected the offer.
It is widely believed that the dominant party is concerned that between the 12 candidates Bashir may not attain the 51% required to win the elections forcing a second round in which opposition parties may back Arman.
The Popular Congress Party (PCP) Islamist leader Hassan Al-Turabi have said that the strategy of the opposition coalition in which his party is a member is to split the votes to prevent Bashir from winning in the first round.
The NCP however dismissed any talk of a second round saying that the opposition presidential candidates will get no more than 35% of the votes with Bashir winning 65%-75%. The NCP’s political officer Ibrahim Ghandour said that that a survey conducted last year showed that Bashir will receive 96% of the votes.
The Sudan Tribune online poll conducted over the last week showed that 7.5% of the 21,642 readers that took part favored Bashir with 46.6% of the votes going to Umma Party leader Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi and 39% to Yasir Arman from the SPLM.
A separate poll made by the Arabic language Sudanile online portal showed 52.9% of the 16,794 votes going to Bashir, 19.3 to Al-Mahdi and 16.8% to Arman.
Tensions are rising ahead of the ballot, with concerns the contest could boost violence in regions already struggling because of bloody inter-ethnic clashes that killed 2,500 people in south Sudan in 2009.
However, Carter said he expected there would be even more violence, and voiced hope it could be kept at a local level.
“I believe sincerely that everyone in Sudan, having suffered 25 years of horrible war, are dedicated to preventing any other outbreaks of violence,” Carter said after meetings in Khartoum with Bashir and the south’s president, SPLM chairman Salva Kiir, in Juba.
“But this will be an intensely competitive election with a lot at stake, and I don’t think there is any doubt that there will be some altercations in the remote areas — and I hope that they don?t expand.”
The elections were provided for in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in 2005 between north and south Sudan to end a devastating 22-year civil war that killed two million people.
The CPA is also meant to pave the way for a referendum on southern independence in January 2011.
(ST)