New challenge to election results

Four opposition parties have jointly applied to Namibia's High Court to have the November 2004 elections declared null and void, with the request that the poll be rerun. "The Republican Party (RP) already filed the court application a few minutes before 17h00 on 15 April, the 30-day deadline to challenge the recount results," said Henk Mudge, president of the RP, "but due to technical reasons we could only make this public now." The Congress of Democrats (CoD), the South West African National Union (SWANU) and the Namibia Movement for Democratic Change (NMDC) had now joined the RP as additional applicants, Mudge added. He said a constitutional vacuum could be created, should the court rule in their favour and order new elections. "It would mean that parliament and the cabinet have to be dissolved, and only the president would remain in power," he explained. Kalla Gertze, secretary-general of CoD, told IRIN that "during the appalling recount last month we gathered concrete evidence to prove irregularities in court". In December 2004 two opposition parties were granted a High Court order to peruse official election material to substantiate their claims of election irregularities in the November elections, which gave the ruling SWAPO party a landslide victory. The CoD and the RP have alleged that the voters' roll was inflated, and the unusually high voter turnout of around 85 percent was "questionable". After copying and reviewing some 60,000 pages of election documentation in December 2004, the parties said they found more discrepancies and asked the court for a recount of all ballots. The High Court granted this second request and a four-day recount exercise followed last month. However, the recount confirmed SWAPO's victory.