After days of protests, Tanzania’s president is declared election winner

The electoral commission of Tanzania said Saturday that President Samia Suluhu Hassan had won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election this past week, a contest that has led to days of violent protests and Tanzania’s gravest political crisis in decades.

Election monitors have questioned the election’s integrity. Top members of the European Parliament said the elections were “neither free nor fair.” They noted reports of electoral irregularities and the obstruction of observers and said the vote had taken place in an atmosphere of repression and fear.

Hassan, 65, a politician from Zanzibar, won nearly 98% of the total votes cast in the election Wednesday, the commission said. It said that almost 87% of the country’s 37.6 million registered voters had turned out. In the previous election in 2020, turnout was about 50%.

Many people appear to have been killed in protests in cities across the country, which were set off by anger that the two main opposition candidates had been disqualified from running. The unrest was also prompted by underlying economic discontent — including over youth unemployment — and appeared in some ways to be similar to demonstrations that erupted in recent weeks in Morocco and in Madagascar, where the president was effectively driven from power.

The precise toll of dead and injured in the protests is contested, and the Tanzanian government has denied that it used excessive force in responding to demonstrators.

In a broadcast on state television late Thursday, the chief of defense forces, Gen. Jacob Mkunda, warned that the military would take “appropriate action” against demonstrators, whom he described as criminals.

A 6 p.m. curfew in the country’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, has been in force since the election. On Friday, there was a heavy security presence in the city, and the streets were largely deserted.

Tanzania, a country of about 70 million people, has been governed by Hassan’s party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or Party of the Revolution, since 1977 under six successive presidents.

The election held little apparent peril for Hassan, given her party’s strength and the disqualifications of the main opposition leader, Tundu Lissu of Chadema, and the leader of a second opposition party, Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo, by the electoral commission, whose members are appointed by the president.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.