Opposition legislators who walked out of the National Assembly in January have decided to return to their parliamentary seats, bringing the country’s political impasse close to an end, Africa Number One radio said on Sunday. The opposition members had left the 109-seat Assembly to protest the defection of one of their legislators to the ruling party coalition following his election in the UN-supervised November/December 1998 polls. The defection had given President Ange Felix Patasse’s Mouvance Presidentielle a majority in the parliament. “The boycott has never been an absolute rule,” the radio, monitored by the BBC, quoted one opposition leader as saying.
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