(Havana) Cuba renewed its National Assembly with the ratification by voters of 470 candidates running for the same number of seats and an increase in turnout compared to the last two polls, the electoral authority announced on Monday.
According to Alina Balseiro, president of the National Electoral Council (CEN), participation, the only issue in Sunday’s legislative election, reached 75.92%.
This rate, the figure of which was questioned by the opposition considered illegal in the communist country, represents a significant increase compared to the last municipal election in November (68.5%), a lowest since the establishment elections in Cuba in 1976.
It was 74% during the referendum in September on the Family Code, and 90% during the referendum on the Constitution in 2019.
Eight million Cubans were called upon to ratify the 470 candidates, 263 women and 207 men, mostly members of the Communist Party of Cuba (CCP, single party), destined to occupy the 470 seats of the National Assembly of People’s Power for the five years coming.
The “preliminary results validate the election of the 470 proposed candidates”, added the CEN President.
In the Cuban voting system, voters had two options on their ballot: check the name of one or more candidates in the constituency or check the “vote for all” option which implied support for all 470 candidates.
According to the President of the CEN, 72.1% of voters chose the “vote for all” and 27.9% the selective vote.
“With the united vote [for all], we are defending the unity of the country, the unity of the revolution, our future, our socialist Constitution,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, 62, said Sunday after voting in his town of Santa Clara, 280 km from Havana, where he was a candidate.
In the weeks leading up to the polls, candidates, including President Diaz-Canel, waged an unusual grassroots campaign to listen to Cuban grievances.
Deprived of candidates, the opposition had called on social networks for abstention.
In a joint statement, several citizen election observation groups denounced the “most irregular elections” since 1976.
They denounced “a crackdown on activists and observers who wished to observe the electoral process” and highlighted the one-hour extension of the opening of polling stations on Sunday, decided by the electoral authorities “without reason of force majeure as provided for the law “.
On April 19, the candidate for the presidency will be chosen among the deputies and elected by this same assembly. Miguel Diaz-Canel, the first president to lead the country after the years in power of the brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, should be a candidate for re-election for a second and final term.
