Tanzanians went to the polls on Wednesday in an election that President Samia Suluhu Hassan is expected to win after candidates from the two leading opposition parties were barred from standing.
In addition to the presidential election, voters are choosing members of the country’s 400 seat parliament and a president and lawmakers in the semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago.
The vote is being held without the leading opposition party, Democracy and Progress, commonly known CHADEMA, whose leader Tundu Lissu is on trial for treason, which he has denied.
The electoral commission disqualified CHADEMA in April after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct.
The commission also disqualified Luhaga Mpina, the presidential candidate for the second-largest opposition party, ACT-Wazalendo, after an objection from the attorney general, leaving only candidates from minor parties taking on Hassan.
“There is no election in Tanzania. If I may sum up properly, it is a coronation,” Deogratius Munishi, CHADEMA’s secretary for foreign affairs, told Citizen Television in neighbouring Kenya on Wednesday.
Early turnout appeared light at polling stations in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam, where there was no sign of the protests that some activists had called for on social media.
President Hassan told reporters after voting in the administrative capital Dodoma: “I urge all Tanzanians, those who are still at home, to come out and exercise their right and vote and choose their preferred leaders.”
Juma Mtali, a businessperson voting in Dar es Salaam, told Reuters his experience had been smooth.
–Reuters–
