Bio wins Sierra Leone presidential election, according to first official data

June 26 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The president of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, has won the presidential elections held this Saturday in Sierra Leone with 55.8 percent of the votes, according to official data from the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone corresponding to 60 percent of the vote.

The 1,067,666 votes that the Commission assigns to Bio place it just above the necessary 55 percent that the electoral legislation of the African country establishes to avoid a second round.

Bio, candidate of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), would thus prevail over the second most voted candidate, Samura Matthew Wilson Kamara, of the All People’s Congress (APC), who has achieved 793,751 votes, 41.5 percent. The other eleven candidates are far behind.

To be declared the winner, one of the candidates for the Presidency must obtain at least 55 percent of the total votes. In case this situation does not occur, there will be a second round between the two most voted, as happened in 2018 between Bio and Kamara.

On the other hand, the parties of Bio and Kamara also appear as the main favorites for the parliamentary elections, in which 135 seats are in dispute that will be chosen based on a controversial system of proportional representation, with a distribution by region — 32 for the east, 26 for the north, 21 for the northwest, 30 for the south and 26 for the west–.

This Saturday’s vote and, especially, the repercussions that it may have at a political and economic level, will mark the short-term future of the African country, which aspires to consolidate the democratic advances obtained in the two decades that have passed since the end of the war, financed to a large extent by the so-called ‘blood diamonds’ and which left around 120,000 dead.