UNITA, the largest opposition party in Angola, claims to have filed a court appeal against the election results from last week.
Despite having a smaller majority, the ruling MPLA party, which has been in office since 1975, was declared the victor of the election.
According to a senior Unita official named Faustino Mumbika, the National Electoral Commission received a complaint on Thursday. Unita, which had its best-ever election outcome, said there were irregularities in the vote.
The MPLA won the election with just over 51 percent of the vote, continuing the party’s nearly five decades of uninterrupted power and granting President Joao Lourenco a second term.
The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), a former rebel group that engaged in a protracted civil war with the MPLA government that ended in 2002, received around 44 percent of the vote, which is its greatest ever showing.
Adalberto Costa Junior, the 60-year-old leader of UNITA, reiterated in a late-night video speech on Thursday that the former rebel movement “does not respect the final results” from the national electoral commission.
UNITA confirmed an earlier report by Portuguese news agency Lusa, which cited a source close to the party’s leadership and said the case listed “several complaints, which amount to illegalities” committed by the commission. UNITA said it had filed the lawsuit to annul the election on its official Instagram account.
It stated that it does not accept the election results and that the electoral commission has received a number of objections. The party has claimed differences between its own counting and the commission’s count.
Four of the 16 electoral commissioners did not approve the final results because they had concerns about the procedure, despite the commission’s denial of any misconduct and insistence that the election was fair and transparent.
