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Easy win for Angola's president

September 1, 2012

Angola's long-serving President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and his MPLA party scored a landslide win taking 74 per cent of the vote. Opposition leaders have criticized the elections as one-sided and full of irregularities.

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Supporters of the ruling MPLA cheer during the party's last rally for the parliamentary elections in Camama, outside the capital Luanda
Image: Reuters

Angolans voted Friday for 220 members of parliament, with the leader of the winning party to become president. Under the new constitution introduced in 2010, the MPLA win means dos Santos is elected for a further five-year term on top of the nearly 33 years he has already served.

The Union for the Total Independence of Angola, a former rebel group, have won one fifth of the votes, and the new CASA party was third with just under five percent.

Voter turnout was just over 57 percent, according to the election commission.

The election is only the third national vote since 1975, when Angola won its independence from Portugal, and the second since the country's 27-year civil war ended in 2002.

In the previous national elections, in 2008, dos Santos' party took 81 percent.

Dos Santos has claimed credit for helping to bring the country out of its civil war and for a program of investment in public services and infrastructure.

However, one of the many issues debated in the elections was Angola's uneven distribution of oil wealth and high youth unemployment rate, with low inward capital investment by outside stakeholders.

mkg/rg (Reuters, AFP, dpa)