Early election results show opposition leading

Results trickling in from general elections held at the weekend in Mauritius show an initial surge for the opposition, the chief electoral commissioner, Irfam Rahman, told IRIN on Monday. Although it was too soon to call the overall poll results, Rahman said the main opposition Social Alliance, led by Navin Ramgoolam, had taken the lead in the national ballot. "We already have results coming in from all parts of the country, and the picture emerging is that the opposition is on a path to unseat the government. They have taken some of the areas which were regarded as strongholds of the ruling alliance," he commented. The electoral race on the Indian Ocean island was seen as a neck-and-neck contest between Ramgoolam and Prime Minister Paul Berenger, who heads the ruling Mauritian Militant Movement political alliance. About 640 candidates contested 62 seats in Sunday's elections. Eight more deputies will be nominated to represent ethnic minorities and complete Mauritius' 70-member Parliament. With a turnout of about 80 percent of the 817,000 registered voters, Rahman said the commission was "generally satisfied" that voting went smoothly. "The whole affair was generally peaceful, except for one or two incidents between supporters of the governing and main opposition coalitions. These were dealt with by the police, but there were no arrests and nobody was injured," he told IRIN. Gilbert Ahnee, editor of the leading independent Le Mauricien newspaper said the reasons behind the early success of the opposition were unclear. "We will have to wait and see what the eventual outcome is, but it appears the opposition has managed to convince the broader electorate that Berenger's economic policies are largely responsible for the growing social and economic divisions," Ahnee noted. In the lead-up to the election, Ramgoolam and his allies had sought to undermine Berenger's government, charging that its policies had made only a handful of Mauritian businesspeople wealthy, at the expense of tens of thousands of people who have lost their jobs in the key textiles and sugar industries. "It is unfair to lay the blame for the downturn in the textile industry at the government's door - any government faced with such stiff competion from China will have a difficult time. As far as the sugar issue goes, that was entirely an EU (European Union) decision," Ahnee said. China's re-emergence as major source of cheap textiles has been particularly devastating for small developing countries with less diversified economies, especially in Africa. Last month Mauritius, a middle-income country and one of Africa's top sugar producers, accused the EU of derailing development after it proposed to drastically cut the price it paid for sugar imported under a quota system. The Indian Ocean island provides the lion's share of the EU quota, supplying 500,000 mt every year under a 1975 protocol agreed with various developing world producers.