Incumbent president claims election victory

Cape Verde’s incumbent President Pedro Pires on Monday claimed victory in his campaign to win re-election as head of state of the cluster of 10 islands and five islets off the West African coast that are home to less than half a million people. Voting took place in the former Portuguese colony on Sunday and preliminary results on Monday gave the incumbent president a narrow lead of 51.1 percent of the vote. In a victory speech, Pires promised to fulfil campaign commitments, including a pledge to tackle poverty and unemployment. “I want to reaffirm here my commitment to the men and women of Cape Verde, my commitment to keeping all the promises I made in this election campaign, and to guarantee all the conditions to ensure Cape Verde has stability and wins always. Cape Verde should always win!” said Pires on Portuguese television. But with results still due in, his main challenger, Carlos Veiga, has not conceded defeat. In the last presidential ballot of 2001, Veiga, who is in his mid-fifties and founded the main opposition party, the Movement for Democracy (MPD), lost to Pires by only 17 votes. About 325,000 Cape Verde citizens are registered to vote. Of these, about 20 percent live abroad, both in Portugal and in the United States. In his early seventies, Pires is a veteran of the liberation struggle against Portuguese rule and served as the country’s first post-independence prime minister from 1975 until 1991, when his party, the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde, lost parliamentary elections for the first time. Cape Verde is poor in natural resources and heavily dependent on international aid and food imports. A spate of severe droughts in the mid-1990s caused the deaths of thousands and prompted mass migration. Today more Cape Verdeans live outside the country than on one of the mountainous islands that make up the Cape Verde archipelago.