Chad’s junta chief Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno won this week’s presidential election in the first round, according to provisional official results released Thursday, extending his family’s decades-long grip on power.Supporters of Masra, a 40-year-old economist, had been holding their own ballot count in parallel to the official one, and in a speech posted on his Facebook page hours before the results were released, Masra said his team’s count “establishes the victory in the first round, that of change over the status quo”.Opponents had called for a boycott of the vote, dismissing it as fixed.Deby was proclaimed transitional president by fellow army generals in 2021 after his father, Idriss Deby Itno, who had ruled Chad with an iron fist for 30 years, was killed in a gun battle with rebels.
Deby promised an 18-month transition to democracy but then extended it by two years.
Opposition figures have since fled, been silenced or joined forces with Deby.
Deby’s cousin and chief election rival Yaya Dillo Djerou was shot point-blank in the head by army soldiers on February 28, according to his party.
The International Federation for Human Rights had warned that the election appeared “neither credible, free nor democratic”.
The International Crisis Group also noted that “a number of problems in the run-up to the balloting cast doubt on its credibility”.
Chad has remained a firm ally of traditional security partner France, whose forces in recent years have been ousted by military regimes in former African colonies including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
The Sahel nations are reeling from jihadist insurgencies and have strengthened ties with Russia after severing them with Paris.
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