Mozambican parliament approves change in general election deadline

Mozambique’s parliament approved this Wednesday a change in the general election date with 164 votes from Frelimo in a meeting marked by a boycott of the opposition, who sang, played vuvuzelas and displayed posters to try to make the job impossible.

Under generally accepted changes, the head of state should call the 2024 general election 15 months in advance, and not 18, that is, in July, and not in April, as required by law.

The changed arrangements are the rules on the election of the President of the Republic, deputies of the Assembly of the Republic, provincial governors and members of provincial assemblies.

The Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo), the governing party with a supermajority of 184 deputies, defended the changes on the grounds that more time was needed to consider holding district elections, a scrutiny it had already deemed “impossible”. .

“Various segments of Mozambican society, namely politicians, religious figures, academics, journalists, civil society organizations and other vital forces, have expressed concern about the possibility, advantages and disadvantages of holding elections at the district level, as provided for in the Basic Law of the Republic of Mozambique”, he said to Frelimo in his opinion presented at the plenary session of the Assembly of the Republic.

The Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), the main opposition party, boycotted the works by putting up posters reading “Tyrant out” and “Down with dictatorship”.

Arnaldo Chalaua, spokesman for the Renamo bench, stated that “the unified bench cannot change and approve” the electoral laws, “it must be a consensus.”

“This indignation, demonstration is the only reserve” left to the opposition.

It’s “a complaint that’s been filed here in the people’s house,” he said, challenging what he sees as Frelimo’s strategy to “revise the Constitution in the usual way, by two-thirds” of parliament after June, because “they already know that with three rooms they don’t can afford it.”

The bench of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), a third party, left the room when the proposal was presented “to signal that democracy is in danger,” said Fernando Bismarck, a spokesman for the bench.

Renamo and MDM say that Frelimo’s goal is to remove district elections from the Constitution without needing opposition votes, since since June (five years after the last amendment to the basic law) it can do so with a two-thirds vote of Parliament. — which has.