Gabon Opposition Questions Landslide Election Win By Junta Leader

Gabons main opposition candidate Alain Claude Bilie by Nze, on Monday April 14, 2025 acknowledged his defeat in the weekend presidential election , but raised concerns about the fairness of the vote that saw junta leader Brice Oligui Nguema secure a landslide victory.

Provisional results showed Nguema , who ousted President Ali Bongo in a 2023 coup, won 90.35 of votes cast on Saturday, giving him a seven-year mandate to lead the central African oil producer.

The election unfolded without the unrest that marred votes in 2016 and 2023, both of which Ali Bongos critics said were rigged in his favor. Nguema, 50, seized power after the disputed 2023 election results and ran on pledges to diversify the oil-reliant economy and end corruption.

Gabon Presidential Runner-Up, Alain Claude Bilie by Nze, speaks at news conference: The choice of continuity, I respect it, even if I cannot support it. Should we congratulate a victory won under such opaque and questionable conditions? All the more so given that the total of the votes attributed to each candidate adds up to 95.18, leaving 4.82 unaccounted for, raising a legitimate doubt about the accuracy of the figures presented by the Ministry of the Interior. I dont think I congratulated the winner. I believe I was misunderstood. I wished him good luck, but I did not congratulate him.

And I am not making myself available to anyone. I am available to the Gabonese people to continue promoting our ideas, the ideas we carried throughout this campaign, which are ideas of rupture, a decisive break, and also a vision of renewed hope for Gabon. This vision is based on a project we presented, focused primarily on economic reform, public finances, and the guaranteed universal income that we proposed to the people of Gabon, Bilie says.