The bloc says poll stuffing, web blackout and politically-motivated abductions compromised the vote’s ‘integrity’.
Final week’s Tanzania elections did not adjust to democratic requirements, says the African Union (AU), including to mounting worldwide strain on President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s administration over the deadly vote.
The AU’s election monitoring arm – which despatched a workforce of 72 observers to Tanzania and Zanzibar for the October 29 election – on Wednesday pointed to poll stuffing, the government-imposed web blackout, allegations of extreme army drive, and politically-motivated abductions as “compromising election integrity”.
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The election “didn’t adjust to AU rules, normative frameworks, and different worldwide obligations and requirements for democratic elections”, the mission’s report concluded, including that the surroundings was “not conducive to peaceable conduct and acceptance of electoral outcomes”.
Protesters poured into the streets of Dar es Salaam and different cities following the election, the place they confronted police violence, clouds of tear gasoline and restricted web entry.
The nation’s foremost opposition social gathering, Chadema, has since claimed hundreds of people were killed, a determine the federal government has denied.
Movies reviewed by Al Jazeera present dozens of our bodies, together with of individuals shot within the head, protesters with bloodied faces, and safety forces firing weapons within the streets.
The AU’s mission urged Tanzanian authorities to train restraint and pursue “thorough investigations” into violence towards protesters.
“Tanzania ought to prioritise electoral and political reforms to handle the basis causes of its democratic and electoral challenges witnessed forward of, throughout, and after the 2025 Common Elections,” the report mentioned.
The AU report got here amid one other uncommon rebuke from the Southern African Growth Neighborhood (SADC) earlier this week, which detailed violence, censorship and “basic intimidation” of the general public and opposition figures.
Total, “voters couldn’t categorical their democratic will”, SADC mentioned in a preliminary report on Monday, including that the elections “fell brief” of SADC rules.
Hassan swept practically 98 % of the vote after her two foremost opponents have been barred from competing. Chadema was disqualified in April after refusing to signal an electoral code of conduct, whereas the nation’s second-biggest social gathering, ACT-Wazalendo, was excluded after an objection from the lawyer basic.
Chadema’s chief Tundu Lissu individually faces a treason trial after calling for election reforms.
SADC chronicled such occasions instantly, writing that the disqualifications had created an “uneven political enjoying area” that undermined the democratic course of.
The final time SADC brazenly criticised an African election course of was throughout Zimbabwe’s election in 2023. It has since noticed a handful of different elections, together with in Malawi, Botswana, South Africa, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In her first feedback after being sworn in, Hassan appeared accountable foreigners for the protests, saying “it was not a shock that these arrested have been from different nations”, based on a translation by the Related Press.
Hassan first took energy in 2021 after the sudden loss of life of her predecessor, John Magufuli.
Since then, native and worldwide watchdogs have repeatedly raised the alarm over her administration’s alleged marketing campaign of compelled disappearances, torture and assault of critics, in addition to widespread media repression.
In June, a panel of United Nations consultants mentioned they’d documented greater than 200 disappearances within the nation since 2019.
