In Mali, a Race Between a Former Finance Minister and a Pro-French Favorite
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Version 0 of 1. DAKAR, Senegal — Two veteran politicians will face each other in a runoff this month in the second round of Mali’s presidential election, the country’s interim government announced Friday. It was another sign that Mali, a troubled West African nation, could be returning to normalcy after more than a year of armed turmoil. Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, foreign minister and lawmaker known for his pro-French sympathies but also favored by some in Mali’s Muslim establishment, and Soumaila Cissé, a former finance minister who once worked for IBM, came out on top after a first round of voting last Sunday. Political analysts said that the high turnout — over 51 percent, surpassing previous elections — was a sign that Mali’s strife-weary citizens were eager for stability, as well as an indication of the potency of Islamic organizations in getting out the vote in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. Results trickled in all week, but the official tally was not announced until Friday. Mali, which is nearly twice the size of Texas, has limited roads, and the election was hastily organized. Because neither of the top candidates gained more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held Aug. 11. But Mr. Keita, who has ties to France’s Socialists and is considered the favorite of France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, was well ahead, with 39 percent to Mr. Cissé’s 19 percent. Mr. Keita is from the fertile, agricultural south and did well in the south’s population centers. Mr. Cissé, originally from the desert north, scored well in other regions. It was a north-south split that helped tear the country apart. As longstanding members of Mali’s political elite, both men are associated with one of the most spectacular collapses to have befallen any West African nation in recent years. In 12 months Mali went through two rebellions (the second, by Islamists, resulted in the loss of half its territory to Al Qaeda allies), the fall of its government and army, a coup d’état, several mutinies and a military intervention by France that saved the country from a possible Islamist takeover. None of the country’s institutions or the men associated with them were able to forestall these calamities. Now, seven months after French troops pushed the militants back into the desert in Mali’s north, the country remains on foreign life-support, sustained by more than 3,000 French troops, a promised United Nations force of at least 10,000 and the prospect of billions of dollars in aid from Western countries. Mr. Keita is the clear favorite in the runoff. As prime minister in the 1990s, he dealt severely with student protests. “He incarnates this figure of authority,” said Gilles Holder, a Mali expert at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. A two-time loser in presidential elections in the past decade, Mr. Keita also opposed Mali’s last elected president, Amadou Toumani Touré, who is now in exile and widely held responsible for the country’s collapse through a combination of corruption and passivity. “Malians feel humiliated,” Mr. Holder said, so “the vote for I.B.K.,” as Mr. Keita is known in Mali, “is a patriotic vote.” He added that Mr. Keita had “invoked the image of General de Gaulle.” But so has the leader of the group who overthrew Mr. Touré in a military coup in March 2012, Capt. Amadou Sanogo. He once compared himself to Charles de Gaulle in an opinion article for the French newspaper Le Monde. Mr. Keita’s relationship with the junta is ambiguous; he was one of the only leading political figures not disturbed by the military last year. Mr. Cissé was beaten and imprisoned by coup supporters, and his house was ransacked. Mr. Keita has been accused of being too close to those involved with the coup, a charge he denies. But this week, a minister in the interim government with close ties to the military junta announced to reporters that Mr. Keita was way ahead in the ballot counting and was likely to avoid a runoff — an erroneous claim, as it turned out. |