Gabon held local and legislative elections on Saturday, a double bill that concludes a political transition following an August 2023 coup that ended 55 years of Bongo dynasty rule.
Polling stations were to remain open until 6:00 pm local time (1700 GMT) to allow around 900,000 voters to elect 145 MPs, two of whom are diaspora representatives, and just over 3,000 local and municipal councillors.
"Our sole objective is to secure a strong majority well beyond the absolute majority, in order to champion our ideas," Gabonese President Brice Oligui Nguema posted on Facebook last week.
Most candidates belong to either Nguema's Democratic Union of Builders (UDB) party, which was created in July, or to ex-president Omar Bongo's (1967-2009) Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG), but there are numerous independent candidates too.
The PDG supports Nguema. In April 2024, the party was threatened with a ban for proposing an inclusive national dialogue, and in late July, ousted president Ali Bongo (2009-2023) challenged the legitimacy of the party's new leadership, claiming he was its leader in a video posted on social media.
Spearheaded by the Together for Gabon party of former prime minister Alain Claude Bilie-By-Nze, the opposition has denounced electoral "obstructions", such as "the unavailability of proxies, the absence of electoral roll postings in the provinces, and the opacity of the composition of polling stations".
It has warned of a "desire to exclude part of the electorate and organise large-scale fraud".
Some town halls remained open late into Friday night to allow voters to consult electoral lists and collect voter cards that were only made available late on Wednesday.
Gabon's interior ministry is overseeing the election. It has pledged a transparent process with public vote counting and an election night during which provisional results would be continuously updated, though it did give a date for the publication of final results.
A second election round is to be held on October 11.
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