A thumping win for Tshisekedi in Congo’s election raises eyebrows

The slick ceremony to hail the results of Congo’s presidential election in a hall of bigwigs in fancy suits gave off an air of official competence. Félix Tshisekedi, the incumbent president, won with a thumping 73% of the vote, declared the electoral commission. The runner-up, Moïse Katumbi, a businessman, got 18%. Yet neither the stylish lighting nor the name of the results hall—Bosolo, meaning truth in Lingala, a local language—could undo the chaos of the election day. Nine opposition candidates, including Mr Katumbi, rejected the results and demanded a re-run, denouncing the election as “a sham”.

Congo has vast seams of minerals critical for the green transition, yet 60% of its 100m citizens are extremely poor. Four times the size of France, it is battered by an eternal war in the east that has displaced some 7m people. Polling in such a setting was bound to be patchy but Mr Tshisekedi’s margin of victory far exceeded even his own campaign’s surveys (seen by The Economist), which showed him winning but with less than 50%. Despite a huge rise in death and displacement in the east on his watch, the official result gave him close to 90% of the vote there. “The margin of victory raises a lot of questions,” says Trésor Kibangula of Ebuteli, a local think-tank.

An influential observer mission of Catholic and Protestant churches documented “numerous cases of irregularities that could affect the integrity of the results”. Yet it crucially also said that by its parallel count “one candidate clearly stood out from the others, with more than half of the votes.” That may reassure many that fraud was not on a scale to delegitimise the winner. (After the last election, in 2018, Mr Tshisekedi was declared the victor despite the Catholic Church’s parallel count and leaked official data showing that another candidate, Martin Fayulu, had easily won.)