Filipe Nyusi won his second term as president with a landslide almost as large as Armando Guebuza’s second term victory a decade ago. But, as we note in the remainder of this report, there were more reports of serious misconduct than in any previous elections. Guebuza in 2009 won 75% of the vote and Frelimo 191 seats in parliament (AR), while in 2019 Nyusi won 73% and Frelimo 184 seats.
In all elections the main opponent was Renamo, which had been the guerrilla movement fighting the government in the 1981-92 war.
Renamo did best in 1999, with 48% of the presidential votes and 117 seats in the AR, and did worst in 2004 with only 16% of the presidential votes and just 51 seats in parliament. Until his death in 2018, Afonso Dhlakama was the only Renamo presidential candidate, and he raised his vote to 37% in 2014 against Nyusi, and Renamo gained 89 seats in the AR. In this election, Renamo head Ossufo Momade with 21% of the vote and 60 AR seats did worse than Dhlakama in 2014 but slightly better than him in 2009.
The third presidential candidate in the past three elections has been MDM head and Beira mayor Daviz Simango. His vote has been stable at about 300,000 which means it is falling in percentage terms (from 9% to 4%) as the electorate grows.
Each presidential candidate must present 10,000 notarised signatures of registered voters to the Constitutional Council (CC).
On 31 July the CC accepted four candidates but rejected three because of false signatures.
Accepted were candidates of the three main parties – Filipe Nyusi (Frelimo), Ossufo Momade (Renamo) and Daviz Simango (MDM), as well as one small party candidate, Mário Albino of AMUSI, a Nampula-based party that broke away from MDM.
Rejected were candidacies of Alice Mabota, former head of the Human Rights League standing for CAD, Hélder Mendonça of Podemos, and Eugénio Estêvão, General Secretary of MAMO.
The CC pointed to “blatant evidence that signatures had been signed by the same hand” and in some cases “proponent voter registration cards displaying a numerical sequence of voter cards, which leads to the assumption that they are merely copies of voter registration books.”
Alice Mabota initially had 688 signatures by the same person, 1091 people who signed her forms more than once, and 4,164 with invalid or impossible registration numbers.
Helder Mandonça submitted 12,250 signatures of which 4,147 were invalid.
Eugénio Estêvão submitted 11,340 signatures of which 7,732 were invalid, including 5,360 clearly signed by the same person.
