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Gabon's ruling party wins

Libreville - The ruling Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) of President Omar Bongo has maintained a large majority following parliamentary elections, Interior Minister Antoine Mboumbou Miyakou announced late on December 27, 2001. According to incomplete and provisional results, the ruling party won 84 of the 120 parliamentary seats at Sunday's run-off polls, two weeks after a first round was marred by violence.

Having already secured 53 seats in that first vote on December 9, Bongo's ruling party won a further 31 seats on December 23, 2001. The opposition parties, who entered the election split between those supporting the vote and those calling for a boycott, won just 12 seats in total. Eleven independent candidates, mainly ex-PDG members, were also elected as were three candidates from parties allied to the ruling party.

Ten seats are yet to be decided. In many of these the first round of voting was repeated on Sunday due to violence or the destruction of ballot papers the first time round. However the ruling camp can already rely on the support of 98 of the 120 MPs in the new parliament, a bigger majority than in the outgoing legislature which was voted in in 1996. Gabon's constitutional court ordered the first round to be re-run in its entirety in seven districts, including Libreville, because of the December 9 violence. Those districts will hold their second round of voting on January 6.

Opposition candidates have taken it in turn to denounce what they call a return to a single-party system, fuelled by the dominance of the PDG. Countering their criticism, Prime Minister Ntoutoume Emane has said that democracy does not necessarily imply a change in power, citing the examples of Japan and Mexico where he noted that "the same parties have been in power for 40 years."

Police and soldiers were deployed on Sunday in a bid to prevent what Ntoutoume Emane called "acts of incivility and violence" that marred the first round, including the burning of ballot boxes in the southern district of Ndende. And voting was postponed in a district of northeastern Gabon where an outbreak of the deadly Ebola fever has claimed 13 victims.

Gabon, which President Bongo has ruled since 1967, is considered one of the most stable countries in west Africa, in large part because of oil wealth which has also made it one of the most prosperous nations in the region.

Timber is another major export product. However, much of the wealth has not filtered down from the political and business elite to the impoverished majority. The provisional results, announced late on Thursday by the national electoral commission, will become definitive after their proclamation by the constitutional court in the coming days.

In two constituencies the voting was tied between the two leading candidates. As a result of one of these ties, Commerce Minister Alfred Mabika remains the only member of the previous government not to have been returned, yet, to parliament. - Sapa-AFP

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