Editor TLN
Sep. 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of Angola, Joao Lourenço, was sworn in on Thursday for a second term at the head of the African country after his victory in the elections held in August, elections marked by protests by the main opposition party, which filed an appeal with the courts after denouncing irregularities in the vote.
The act, led by the president of the Constitutional Court, Laurinda Cardoso, took place in the Angolan capital, Luanda, amid a major security deployment. According to information from the newspaper ‘Novo Jornal’, traffic has been practically paralyzed and circulation in the Plaza de la República has had numerous restrictions that have also affected journalists covering the event.
Lourenço, who has won a new five-year term, has thanked the official bodies and the population for the “success” of the last elections. “I congratulate the people, who are the true winner of the general elections”, he pointed out during his investiture speech.
“The Angolans have shown the world that at crucial moments they know how to choose the leaders,” he argued, a day after the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) reiterated that it refused to recognize the results of the elections.
The Angolan Constitutional Court rejected last week the request presented by the main opposition party to annul the results of the general elections held on August 24, in which the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) prevailed with 51 percent of the votes.
In fact, the opposition formation proclaimed itself the winner of the elections last week despite the fact that the results granted it to Lourenço’s MPLA, a political force that controls the politics of the African country since its independence from Portugal in 1975.
The president, born in 1954, was elected in 2017 as vice president of the MPLA and confirmed by the party’s Central Committee as a candidate for the general elections that year after the then president, José Eduardo dos Santos, announced that he would withdraw from the politics. At that time, Lourenço also held the position of defense minister and was considered the president’s ‘dolphin’, from whom he has subsequently distanced himself.
Thus, since coming to power, he has launched numerous campaigns against the corruption of the former president’s close circle -who died in June in a Barcelona clinic at the age of 79-, including his daughter, Isabel dos Santos, considered in the past as the richest woman in Africa.
