Mauritanian legislative election - September 1/15, 2018

[Sir John Johns]

Note: I haven’t had the time to make all the research I wanted to do nor to draft a write-up about Mauritania’s political history as I wasn't aware that this election would be hold so early since few days ago. I have mostly elaborated on what I (perhaps wrongly) considered as important: ethnic relations and the sparse information I have found about Mauritanian parties. Again I'm far from an expert on the subject but I thought this election deserves to be covered.

Legislative and local elections are held today in Mauritania to elect the 157 deputies of the unicameral National Assembly (the indirectly elected Senate having been abolished last year by referendum), the presidents of the six newly instituted regional councils and the mayors of the 216 municipalities.

Political system

The six new regions

Deputies are elected through a pretty insane system I’m not sure to have fully understand with Mauritanian voters having to vote for three distinct lists of candidates:
- 117 deputies are elected in 47 single- and multi-member constituencies (the numbers of seats by constituency varying from 1 to 18) with a runoff being held on September 15 in the single- and two-seat constituencies in which no candidate or no list has achieved an absolute majority in the first round; in the constituencies with three or more seats, deputies are elected in a single round with seats being allocated by PR using the largest remainder system. To ensure gender balance, male and female candidates are required to alternate throughout the list in constituencies with two seats or more.
- 20 deputies are elected in a nationwide constituency on a party list alternating men and women candidates with seats being allocated by PR using the largest remainder system.
- 20 deputies are elected in a nationwide constituency on a party list exclusively made up of women candidates with seats being allocated by PR using the largest remainder system.

Mauritanian political landscape is characterized by an incredible high number of political parties: 104 registered political parties in a country of 4,300,000 inhabitants and this number doesn’t even include at least two influential parties whose registration has been rejected by the electoral authorities. In order to reduce the number of existing parties, the Mauritanian government has recently passed legislation providing for the automatic dissolution of every party which would have either failed to participate in two consecutive local elections or failed to receive more than 1% of the vote in two consecutive municipal elections. In the last legislative and local elections, held in 2013, many opposition parties boycotted the poll arguing of widespread fraud; so this year, they are forced to participate in the elections to avoid losing their registration. As a consequence, there is no less than 67 different lists running for constituency seats, 87 for women reserved seats, 96 for at-large seats and 143 for municipal elections.

What is at stake

President Ould Abdel Aziz

These elections are taking place one year before the next presidential election in which incumbent president, Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, is, so far, constitutionally barred from running. The latest of a series of military heads of state who have ruled over Mauritania almost without interruption since 1978, Ould Abdel Aziz came to power through a military coup in 2008 before being formally elected president in 2009 and reelected in 2014, both times through flawed elections. Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest issues of the campaign is whether Ould Abdel Aziz will keep his repeated promise to respect the constitution and left the presidency at the end of his second term in office (in which case, it is widely expected he would continue to rule Mauritania through a proxy president whose name is not yet known) or if he will try to change the constitution to remove presidential term limits. In the latter case, Ould Abdel Aziz will need his party and its allies (assuming the latter don’t desert though, which isn’t a given) to win a two-thirds majority (required to amend the constitution) in the next National Assembly. So, while a victory of Ould Abdel Aziz’s party makes no doubt, it remains to see if it will be able to win said two-thirds majority in the next legislature without resorting to an excessive amount of fraud.

Meanwhile, the opposition is trying to exploit the relative unpopularity of the president to deny his party an absolute majority, or at least a two-thirds majority, and to prepare the ground for a (very hypothetical) political alternation in 2019 by capturing several regional presidencies (the big prize being that of Nouakchott, the capital), an important step in the building of a strong electoral basis.

However, the opposition is divided into countless parties so these elections will also be important to determine which parties could legitimately pretend to play a leading role inside the opposition in the future, which ones are still electorally relevant and which ones are doomed to lose their registration. The battle for the first place is expected to be played out between the Tawassoul and the Sawab parties.

The first one, an Islamist party, has experienced a spectacular political rise since its legalization in 2008 and is the largest opposition party in parliament since the 2013 legislative elections (boycotted by numerous other opposition parties); having took the leadership of the main opposition alliance, the National Forum for Democracy and Unity (FNDU) – a motley alliance of parties without any ideological coherence – Tawassoul is aiming at consolidating its status of largest opposition party in Mauritania and at becoming the only credible alternative to the rule of Ould Abdel Aziz.

Biram Dah Abeid

For its part, Sawab is a minor Baathist party which has so far failed to made any electoral breakthrough, but which has recently received the support of popular anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid – whose party has failed to gain registration – and his quite powerful Initiative for the Resurgence of Abolitionist Movement (IRA). I have some doubts over the chance of Biram Dah Abeid’s odd alliance to displace Tawassoul as Mauritania’s largest opposition force but he has nonetheless already announced his intention to run for president in 2019; in the latest presidential election, held in 2014 and boycotted by Tawassoul, running as an independent candidate, Biram Dah Abeid surprisingly finished ahead of other opposition candidates, far behind Ould Abdel Aziz though, with 8.7% of the vote.

Background

Covering an area of 1,030,000 km², Mauritania is the 28th largest country in the world but also one with the lowest population density: 3.4 inhabitants per square kilometer, the second lowest density in Africa behind Namibia. However, as the Sahara desert covers about 70% of Mauritania’s territory (basically all the northern and central parts of the country), most of the population is concentrated in the Southwest, along the coastline and in the Senegal River valley.

Since independence in 1960, the control of such a large territory (especially the immense desert lands) and of the long ruler-drawn borders with Western Sahara, Algeria and Mali has been a challenge for the successive Mauritanian governments: in the 1970s, Mauritania faced regular military incursions by the Polisario Front, coming from Western Sahara, which shelled Nouakchott on two occasions; more recently, international Islamist militants and transborder criminal organizations involved in various illicit trafficking (drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, fuel, weapons) have made a home in the remotest desert areas.

Mauritania's exports

Economy of Mauritania has been traditionally dominated by herding (in the Sahara desert and in the Sahelian strip) and cultivation (in the Senegal River valley) and agriculture remains the country’s main industry of employment even if its share in the national GDP has constantly declined over years. Fishing is also an important economic sector but Mauritanian authorities are powerless to stop the large-scale plunder of the country’s fish-bearing waters by foreign (especially Chinese) fishing fleets. Iron ore is mined since 1963 in the vicinity of Zouérat (northern Mauritania) by the now public-owned Miferma and is exported through the port of Nouadhibou (the country’s second largest city), which is connected to the iron ore deposits by Mauritania’s only railway line. Recent years have seen the spectacular development of copper and gold mining (the area of Tijirit, in the Northwest, has notably experienced since 2016 a largely uncontrolled gold rush) and oil extraction which are now providing additional revenue sources for the Mauritanian state. Some experts are predicting that Mauritania is on the way to change from an economy depending on foreign aid to a self-reliant mining-driven economy.

Located at the crossroads of the Arab and the West African worlds, Mauritania is largely an artificial country whose recent political history has been marked by the difficult coexistence between two large population groups – the Moors and the “Black Mauritanians” – that have little in common beside Islam, which is practiced by 99% of the Mauritanian population. In addition to this cleavage between Moors and Black Mauritanians – quite abusively reduced to an opposition between White and Black people, nomadic herders and sedentary farmers, Arabic-speakers and African languages-speakers, former slavers and former enslaved, former looters and former looted, heirs of the Almoravid dynasty (whose political and religious influence spread from today’s Mauritania) and heirs of the Ghana Empire (whose capital, Koumbi Saleh, was located in today’s southeastern Mauritania) –, fractures also divide the Moorish society making Mauritania a country in which the construction of national identity process is far from having been achieved.

The Moors

The Moors (in French, Maures) constitute the largest cultural group in Mauritania and have given their name to the country. Belonging to the Arab-Berber civilization, they speak Hassaniya Arabic, an Arabic dialect with numerous Berber loanwords. A large majority of the Moors used, until recent decades, to live a nomadic life in the Sahara desert and the Sahelian strip; in precolonial times, they routinely engaged into plundering raids and slave razzias against the dark-skinned population living further South, which has been the source of historical grudges with the Black Mauritanians.

Nevertheless, the Moors are far from being a racially and ethnically homogenous group. They are organized into a complex, very hierarchical and rigid system of tribes (qabā'il) partly structured along ethnic origins. At the top of the Moorish social pyramid are the Banū Hassān, which are tribes of warriors supposedly of Arabian descent who invaded today’s Mauritania starting from the 14th century. Below rank the Zawāyā – the tribes of marabouts – who are believed to be mostly the descendants of the light-skinned Sanhadja Berbers (who ruled over today’s Mauritania before the arrival of the Banū Hassān and played a major role in the emergence and the development of the Almoravid power) but also include some elements of Arabian descent. The next lower level of the Moorish traditional society is occupied by the Znāga – the vassal tribes who were forced to pay until the 1960s a tribute to the Banū Hassān and the Zawāyā tribes – who are also predominantly of Sanhadja ancestry. These three categories are generally lumped together under the denomination of “White Moors” or Bīdān (“Whites”) but several authors are also including under the latter term the lower layers of the Moorish society, an illustration of the difficulty to correctly label these latter. Except during the French colonial period, the Bīdān have held political power in today’s Mauritania at the expense of both the Moorish lower social categories and the non-Moorish populations.

At the bottom of the Moorish social pyramid are the servile categories and the “castes” of people performing what are considered as degrading jobs. Neither of them are organized into tribes but are instead tied to the Bīdān by strong patronage links. The two largest “castes” are made by blacksmiths (Mu’allemīn) and griots (Iggāwen); these professions still face social stigma and are largely marginalized. Much more numerically important are the servile categories which are constituted by the slaves (‘Abīd) and freed slaves and their descendants (Harātīn; singular Hartāni), all of them being of Black African ancestry. They are collectively referred to by the term of “Black Moors” or Sūdān (Blacks), with the latter term sometimes also including the (free and non-Arabized) Black Mauritanian populations. The exact origins of the ‘Abīd and the Harātīn remain disputed but it is more or less established that only a minority of them are actually the descendants of dark-skinned populations living in the southern part of Mauritania; it’s very important to understand that the Moorish servile categories have few cultural, social and political affinities with the Black Mauritanians. When Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1980 (the last country in the world to do so), the ‘Abīd constituted only a minor fraction of the Sūdān population; they rapidly were merged with the Harātīn. The Harātīn continue to face huge political, social and economic discrimination and to be kept in a state of dependency on their Bīdān patrons/former masters. Despite the theoretical abolition of slavery, it is estimated that half of the Harātīn community is still victim of bonded or forced labor.

While traditional social divisions have persisted in the Moorish society, the old racial lines have been blurred by centuries of mixing and skin color is no longer a reliable indicator of the social status. Some sources even indicate that Bīdān and Harātīn have became racially indistinguishable. In any case, the ambiguous status of the Harātīn – discriminated by the Bīdān ruling class but sharing few cultural traits with the Black Mauritanians with whom they even occasionally clash – has been since recent decades the subject of an endless and highly politicized debate. Should they be considered as an ethnic group or as a social class? Are they Moors, Black Mauritanians or should they be considered as a third, distinct, community? Should they allied with the Black Mauritanians to overthrow the Bīdān harsh rule or should they remain faithful to the Bīdān with which they share the same language and the same culture? None of these questions have been definitively answered and even the Harātīn are divided over the issue.

The Black Mauritanians

Languages of Mauritania

The remaining of the Mauritanian population is largely constituted by the various non-Moorish, non-Arabic speaking Black African ethnic groups living in the southern part of the country, especially in the Senegal River valley, on both sides of the border with Senegal and southwestern Mali. Unlike the Moors, they were historically almost all exclusively sedentary populations and speak languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family. Lumped together, these ethnic groups are called Kwār by the Moors; the terms of “Black Mauritanians” (in French Négro-Mauritaniens) or “Afro-Mauritanians” have been introduced in recent decades to refer to them. However, several Black Mauritanian political organizations consider the Harātīn as being part of the Black Mauritanian community.

The Black Mauritanians are divided into four or five ethnic groups, the two most important being the Soninke (or Sarakole) – who speak a language pertaining to the Mande family – and the Halpulaaren – who speak Pulaar, a Fula language. Halpulaaren are generally themselves divided between the Fuutankooɓe (Toucouleur), who are sedentary farmers, and the Fulɓe (Fula), who are nomadic herders. Small populations of Wolof – speaking a Fula-related language – and Bambara – speaking a language pertaining to the Mande family – are also to be found in the southern part of the country, respectively in the lower course of the Senegal River and in the southeastern Néma Department. Soninke, Halpulaaren and, to a lesser extent, Wolof, are all organized into rigid and hierarchical societies in a way not too dissimilar from the Moorish society: at the top of the social pyramid are the aristocrats, the warriors and the clerics and at the bottom are the slaves.

Other ethnic groups

Noticeable smaller ethnic minorities include the Malian Tuareg refugees – who speak Tamasheq (a Berber language) and are to be found in the southeastern part of Mauritania where their number is increasing since the 1990s due to political turmoil in Mali –, the now largely extinct Imragen – a dark-skinned fishing people living along the Atlantic shore – and the Nemadi – a numerically very small population of Berber antelope hunters living in the southeast part of Mauritania, near Oualata.

[Sir John Johns]

Ethnic relations since the independence

In 1960, the Bīdān accounted for 53%, the Harātīn for 27% and the “Black Sedentary” (which apparently also included the nomadic Fulɓe because for the colonial administration and later the Mauritanian government: nomads = Moors; sedentary = Black Mauritanians) peoples for 20% of Mauritania’s population. However, since the 1980s, the Mauritanian government has stopped to publish official ethnic statistics, probably because the Bīdān are no longer the largest community in Mauritania. Indeed, the Harātīn and even more the Black Mauritanians – who unlike Moors practice polygyny – are said to have had since independence a stronger demographic growth than the Bīdān. There are no updated reliable statistics about the exact ethnic composition of Mauritania as it’s a highly politicized topic: according to the most commonly accepted estimate, Harātīn constitute about 40% of Mauritania’s population and Bīdān and Black Mauritanians about 30% each.

Tensions between Moors and Black Mauritanians have been exacerbated by the radical and rapid social changes experienced by Mauritania in recent decades, during which the country went from a predominantly nomadic and rural society to a largely sedentary and urban one. Between 1965 and 2013, the share of nomads among the total population totally collapsed from 73% to only 1.9% while the share of population living in urban areas jumped from 6.9% in 1960 to 61.0% in 2017. This later phenomenon is best exemplified by the tremendous and anarchic growth of Nouakchott, a modest village until it was chosen in 1958 to become the capital of the country: the population of the city exploded from 5,800 people in 1961 to 958,000 in 2013 and this later number is probably an underestimation; it is said that the actual population of Nouakchott accounts between one quarter and one third of the 4,300,000 inhabitants country.

Rural exodus has been accelerated by the catastrophic droughts that hit the country in the 1970s and early 1980s and by the desertification process that turned large parts of Northern and Central Mauritania into wastelands unfit for herding. As a consequence, Moorish pastoral nomads were forced either to settle down in Nouakchott – where they have crammed themselves into shantytowns and are living in dire conditions (some authors are speaking over the constitution of a Hartāni urban lumpenproletariat) – or to move southwards, in the Senegal River valley, where they switched to farming. There, clashes over land ownership and distribution inevitably happened between the Bīdān and Hartāni newcomers on one hand and the native Black Mauritanians and the Harātīn that have previously settled there and had became largely autonomous from their Bīdān patrons, on the other hand. Disputes over land control, which were systematically settled by the Mauritanian government in favor of the Moorish newcomers, and a land reformed which also benefited only to the Moorish farmers would further increase ethnic and social tensions.

Fearing that one day the Black Mauritanians would became the largest community of the country and/or that they would ally with the Harātīn to challenge their rule, the Bīdān-controlled government had already started from the 1960s to implement a policy of forced Arabization of the country, notably by making in 1965 Arabic the official education language (a measure that led to clashes between Black Mauritanians and Harātīn in the capital) and purging the administration and the army of its Black Mauritanian elements (at the time of the independence, Black Mauritanians constituted a majority of the new country’s public servants).

Things escalated in the 1980s with the establishment by Black Mauritanian activists of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM) guerrilla – which largely failed to win any military success –, the thwarting of a military coup organized by Black Mauritanian officers; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the administration of Col. Maaouya Ould Taya (1984-2005) undertook an ethnic cleansing of the Senegal River valley forcing thousands of Black Mauritanians to flee to Senegal and Mali after having been deprived of their lands, their cattle and their nationality (through the forfeiture and destruction of their identity papers). Said Black Mauritanians have been permitted to return to Mauritania in the late 1990s but it is still estimated that over 30,000 Black Mauritanian refugees are still living in Senegal. In 1993, the Ould Taya government passed an amnesty law offering absolution for the crimes committed by the Mauritanian army in the Senegal River valley.

Other demographic data

In 2015, Mauritania placed 157 out of 188 countries on the Human Development Index, being thus a country with a low human development. On regional level, it ranked 23 out of 48 African countries, placing ahead of neighboring Senegal and Mali but below the other Arab-speaking countries of the area (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya).

It is estimated that 47.9% of the Mauritanian population is illiterate with a huge gender gap: 37.4% for men but 58.4% for women, a number illustrating the low status of the women in Mauritanian society. A large number of Mauritanian women (69% of young Mauritanian women) are still the victims of female genital mutilation, a tradition which concerned both the Moorish (between 69 and 71%) and the Black Mauritanian (between 69 and 72% among Halpulaaren, 92% among Soninke, between 25 and 28% among Wolof) communities. Also, around 22% of Mauritanian women and young girls have been or are still subjected to the traditional custom of Leblouh and force-feeding with liters of camel milk and millet porridge to become obese as being overweight is traditionally considered as a sign of beauty and wealth in the Moorish society and so the guarantee of a good marriage.

Main parties

* Union for the Republic (UPR) – 75 deputies in the 2013 election. The UPR was founded ex nihilo in 2009 as the electoral vehicle of Gen. Ould Abdel Aziz in anticipation of the presidential election held that year. Thanks to direct access to state resources and control over the distribution of public offices, the new party quickly attracted numerous politicians coming from all sides of the political spectrum (Nasserists, Baathists, Islamists, …) and built a powerful clientelistic network which ensured its political hegemony over the country. Tellingly, the UPR is the party which has field the largest number of candidates, competing notably in every single local races. Having established itself as a quasi party-state, the UPR has however no clear ideology and is only united by the authoritarian figure of Ould Abdel Aziz.

Divides have recently appeared inside the UPR, notably over the selection of the candidates for legislative and local elections (with several prominent deselected UPR candidates choosing to run against the official UPR candidate under the banner of various satellite parties of the ruling party) and, also apparently, over a possible presidential candidacy of Ould Abdel Aziz in 2019 which doesn’t seem to please the reformist wing of the party who pleads for the rapid designation of a political successor to the almighty president. In any case, it’s way too early to talk about a possible split of the party and the UPR is guaranteed to placed first in the parliamentary election and to win a majority of municipalities thanks to its unrestrained access to state resources, to its clientelist networks and, also, to fraud, corruption and intimidation of voters.

* Tawassoul or National Rally for Reform and Development (RNRD) – 16 deputies in the 2013 election. An Islamist party acting like the Mauritanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tawassoul was officially registered in 2008, one of the first Islamist parties allowed in the country. Under the political leadership of the charismatic Mohamed Jemil Ould Mansour (a former mayor of Arafat, a poor suburb of Nouakchott), the party rapidly emerged as a major political player. The rapid rise of the party is largely explained by the influence of its spiritual leader, Mohamed El Hassan Ould Dedew (said to be very close to Egyptian-born Qatari theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi), by the considerable amount of money it received from the Gulf monarchies (in particular Qatar) and by the strong charity networks it had built. The party is very popular with the poorest shades of the society, especially the Harātīn, and has also a strong women’s organization. As previously mentioned, Tawassoul is the largest opposition party in parliament since 2013 and is currently holding the leadership of the main opposition alliance, the FNDU.

The party seems however to have been weakened by the recent diplomatic rift between Saudi Arabia and Qatar with rumors of its imminent dissolution over its connections with Qatar (with which Mauritania has broken its diplomatic relations) circulating in 2017. Earlier this year, one of the deputies of Tawassoul was turned back by Saudi border officials, a sign the party has possibly lost the favor of Saudi Arabia and its allies. In last December, the popular Ould Mansour was succeeded at the head of the party by the low-key Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Seyidi which, like Ould Mansour, belongs to the moderate wing of the party which opposed armed fight on the Mauritanian soil. Tawassoul is also facing the radicalization of its rank and file members who seem to be more and more attracted by the Wahhabist doctrine.

* Sawab (“the Right Path”) - no deputy in the 2013 election due to poor results. The last incarnation of a succession of Baathist parties and organizations which used to have a strong influence on Mauritanian politics (notably, Ould Taya’s government choose to remain “neutral” during the Gulf War, which was then understood as a discrete support to the Saddam Hussein regime), Sawab, founded in 2004, has so far failed to gain parliamentary representation and has made mostly headlines because of its strong opposition to Israel (a country with which Ould Taya – yes the same guy who was a buddy with Saddam Hussein – had established relations).

The party could however rise out of irrelevance this year thanks to its unholy alliance with Biram Dah Abeid, a radical opponent to the regime of Ould Abdel Aziz and the Hartāni leader of the anti-slavery organization Initiative for the Resurgence of Abolitionist Movement (IRA) whose political arm, the Radical Party for a Global Action (RAG) has failed to register as a legally recognized political party. The alliance has surprised many observers as Sawab has never cared about the plight of the Harātīn and because Biram Dah Abeid has until now tried to attract the vote of the Black Mauritanians who are presumably not the biggest fans of a Pan-Arabic party.

Among the candidates fielded by the alliance are a Hartāni woman freed in 2008 after 35 years of slavery and the Black Mauritanian widow of an officer murdered during the ethnic cleansing of the Senegal River valley. Biram Dah Abeid himself is a candidate on the Sawab national list but is once again currently in jail, this time under the charge of “incitement to hatred and violence” for having allegedly threatened a journalist.

The result that the Sawab-IRA alliance will obtain is certainly one of the biggest unknown of these elections as Biram Dah Abeid’s party has never contested a parliamentary election until now. It will be interesting to know if and how much the Hartāni could improve on his result in the 2014 presidential election.

* People’s Progressive Alliance (APP) – 7 deputies in the 2013 election. Founded in the 1990s as a Nasserist party and at time a supporter of the Gaddafi regime, the APP was a declining party without real political influence until it accepted in the early 2000s to make an alliance with prominent Hartāni politician Messaoud Ould Boulkheir whose party, the Action for Change, has been recently banned; Ould Boulkheir rapidly hijacked the APP and turned it into a Hartāni- and Black Mauritanian-interest party. The leader of the first important anti-slavery movement, El-Hor (“Free Man”) and a strong defender of human rights (who has notably denounced the amnesty of the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing against the Black Mauritanians and has opposed the successive military dictatorships), Ould Boulkheir has been, among other things, the first Hartāni to hold a ministerial portfolio, the first one to run for president and the first one to chair the National Assembly. The APP probably reached the apex of its electoral influence in 2009 when Ould Boulkheir placed second behind Ould Abdel Aziz in the presidential election held that year.

Since then, however, the party is declining due to its aging leadership, the constantly changing positions of Ould Boulkheir (who has moved closer to Ould Abdel Aziz in recent years) and the competition with the more dynamic and activist IRA. Maybe to mitigate the exodus of its members toward Biram Dah Abeid’s organization, the APP has made the bizarre choice in these elections to ally itself with the Front of Authenticity and Renewal (FAR), a Salafist party which has failed to gain registration. Members of the FAR are said to have promised once that, if they come to power, democracy will be abolished until the Last Judgment. So, ironically, a party that was once a secular Nasserist organization is now becoming the vehicle of insane religious extremists…

* Rally of Democratic Forces (RFD) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A left-wing party affiliated to the Socialist International, the RFD was founded in 2001 after its predecessor party, the Union of Democratic Forces (UFD), had been banned by president Ould Taya. Once the most important opposition force, notably in the early 1990s and in 2007-2008, the UFD/RFD has been weakened by a succession of splits and marginalized because of its radical and uncompromising opposition to Ould Abdel Aziz. Now it is reduced to the small loyal core of supporters of its founder and historical leader, Ahmed Ould Daddah, a veteran politician who notably served as head of the Central Bank of Mauritania and the half-brother of the first president of Mauritania, Moktar Ould Daddah (1960-1978). Suffering from an aging leadership, the RFD seems doomed to an inexorable decline.

* Union of the Forces of Progress (UFP) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A leftist party tied to Mauritania’s main trade union, the General Confederation of Mauritanian Workers (CGTM), the UFP was officially founded in 1998 as a breakaway of the main opposition party, Ahmed Ould Daddah’s UFD, but its roots go back to various 1970s clandestine far-left movements, notably the Maoist Kadihine Party of Mauritania. Under the leadership of Mohamed Ould Maouloud, a former student leader in the 1970s, the UFP has became part of the Tawassoul-led FNDU, a choice that has been challenged by the youth wing of the party which denounced a betrayal of the secular ideals of the UFP. The aging Ould Maouloud has managed to provisionally settle the dispute but his leadership could be once again challenged in case of bad results.

* Union for Democracy and Progress (UDP) – 6 deputies in the 2013 election. A party founded in 1993 by Hamdi Ould Mouknass, a foreign minister under Moktar Ould Daddah, as a split of Ahmed Ould Daddah’s UFD. The breakaway was mostly motivated by Ould Mouknass’s desire to held a ministerial portfolio in the administration of President Ould Taya, after years spent in the opposition. After the death of Ould Mouknass in 1999, the leadership of the UDP went to his daughter, Naha Mint Mouknass, one of the few women to currently lead a Mauritanian political party. An earlier supporter of Ould Abdel Aziz, the declining UDP has turned into a satellite party of the ruling UPR and as a vehicle for dissidents of the presidential party who are unwilling to join the ranks of the opposition.

* National Pact for Development and Democracy (ADIL) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A party founded in 2007 to provide a parliamentary majority to the new democratically elected president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi (first civilian president since 1978) and which attracted then numerous politicians wanting their share of political power. However, as Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was ousted from office by Ould Abdel Aziz the following year, the ADIL has lost its main (only?) asset: access to the state resources and the distribution of public offices. The staunch and active opposition displayed by the ADIL towards Ould Abdel Aziz could possibly help however the party to stay relevant. The ADIL is currently led by Yahya Ould Ahmed El Waghef, who served as prime minister of Ould Cheikh Abdallahi.

* Mauritanian Party for Unity and Change (Hatem) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A Pan-Arabic party accused of Islamist sympathies, Hatem was founded by several military leaders of the 2003 failed coup against President Ould Taya and is led by Saleh Ould Hanena, one of the coup plotters and the former head of the Knights of Change, a short-lived anti-Ould Taya guerrilla mostly active in eastern Mauritania.

* El Wiam or Party of the Democratic and Social Agreement (PEDS) – 10 deputies in the election of 2013. A self-described moderate and centrist party advocating economic liberalization and opposed to ethnic politics, El Wiam was founded in 2011 by splinters of the ADIL and by former members of the Democratic and Social Republican Party (PRDS), the ruling party during the “democratic” years of the Ould Taya regime. Its leader is Boidiel Ould Houmeid, a Hartāni trade unionist who served himself as minister under Ould Taya. El Wiam is part of the so-called “dialoguiste” opposition (i.e. open to dialogue with Ould Abdel Aziz) and supported the proposals of the government put to referendum held last year (abolition of the Senate, change of the flag and of the anthem, creation of the regional councils).

* Alliance for Justice and Democracy/Movement for Renewal (AJD/MR) – 4 deputies in the 2013 election. A Black Mauritanian interest party founded in 2007, the AJD/MR has received the endorsement of the Progressive Forces of Change (FPC), the successor organization of the former FLAM guerrilla. Its leader is Ibrahima Mocta Sarr, a former member of the APP and a former presidential candidate. Noticeably, the party is the strongest among the Halpulaaren community.

* El Karama – 6 deputies in the 2013 election. A satellite party of the UPR led by Cheikhna Ould Hijbou. Like the UDP, it serves as an alternative party for UPR politicians who have failed to win the nomination of the presidential party but are still unwilling to join the opposition.

* Burst of Youth for the Nation (SJN) – 4 deputies in the 2013 election. A satellite party of the UPR founded in 2011 and currently led by Guisset Diallel Abou who had replaced the founder, Lalla Cheriva, one of the few women to have led a Mauritanian party.

* Republican Party for Democracy and Renewal (PRDR) – 3 deputies in the 2013 election. The successor of the Democratic and Social Republican Party (PRDS), the ruling party during the “democratic” years of the Ould Taya presidency. Now a mere shadow of itself and a satellite of the UPR.

* El Vadila (“Virtue”) - 3 deputies in the 2013 election. A traditionalist Islamist party allied to the UPR and led by Othman Ould Cheikh Abou El Maali, which is also the president of the alliance of the parties of the presidential majority.

* Ravah (“Welfare”) - 3 deputies in the 2013 election. An Arab nationalist party and the local fan-club of Bashar al-Assad.

* Party of Unity and Development (PUD) – 3 deputies in the 2013 election. Another satellite party of the UPR.

* Movement for the Refounding (MPR) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A Black Mauritanian party led by Kane Hamidou Baba, a former RFD deputy and a member of the Halpulaaren community. The MPR is a member of the FNDU.

* Party for Equality and Justice (PLEJ) – boycotted the 2013 legislative election. A Black Mauritanian interest party led by Bâ Mamadou Alassane, a veteran politician and former minister under Moktar Ould Daddah. The party is strongest among the Fuutankooɓe community.

* El Islah – 1 deputy in the 2013 election. A satellite party of the UPR led by Mohamed Ahmed Salem Talebna, the chairman of the parliamentary Algerian-Mauritanian Friendship Committee and a supporter of the independence of Western Sahara.

* National Democratic Alliance (AND) – no deputy. A new party founded in 2016 by splinters of the RFD led by Mohamed Abderrahmane Ould Moine, a foreign minister under Ould Taya. Its current president is Yacoub Ould Moine, the son of Mohamed Abderrahmane.

[Sir John Johns]

One week after the first round, the Mauritanian National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) finally released some provisional results of the legislative and local elections. As expected, the ruling UPR places first with 67 out of 157 seats against 31 seats for the combined opposition parties. The rest of the seats isn’t yet distributed among parties or will be determined in the runoff. Tawassoul keep its status of largest opposition party with 14 seats (almost half of the seats won by the opposition). Biram Dah Abeid managed to get elect on the Sawab party’s list but the alliance between the Baathists and the abolitionists has clearly failed to make the expected electoral breakthrough.

Tawassoul’s second place and the failure of Biram Dah Abeid is clearly the best outcome for the Ould Abdel Aziz regime which will continue to present himself as a bulwark against the Islamist threat and has marginalized Biram Dah Abeid, the more palatable opponent for the Western countries. The runoff race for the control of the regional council of Nouakchott will be interesting to watch as the Islamist candidate, Mohamed Jemil Ould Mansour (the former leader of Tawassoul) came a close second (22.5% against 23.8%) behind the UPR candidate.

I haven’t found so far a detailed list of the seats obtained by each party but the results of the election of the 20 at-large seats can give you an idea of the strength of the various political forces (and the insane fragmentation of the Mauritanian political landscape):

UPR 19.4%
Tawassoul 11.3%
UDP 4.4%
El Karama 3.5%
AND 3.2%
UFP 2.8%
RFD 2.7%
Choura Party for Development 2.2%
United Party for the Construction of Mauritania (UCM) 2.0%
APP 1.8%
Sawab 1.8%
SJN 1.6%
ADIL 1.4%
El Wiam 1.3%
Conciliation and Prosperity Party (HIWAR) 1.1%
AJD/MR 1.0%
PUD 1.0%
Ravah 1.0%
the 78 other parties received all less than 1%

Turnout 73.4%

The number of blank votes is also insanely high: from 11.9% for the municipal elections to 21.1% for the regional elections. Actually, in the election of the regional council of Nouakchott, there were more blank votes than votes received by the leading candidate.