False stories of a coup in the West African Nation of Côte d’Ivoire surfaced this week in the middle of assembly tensions in the next October elections of October.
Several accounts on social media sites, including Facebook and X, have published huge crowd videos in the streets with fire buildings, which, according to them, came from the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
However, no violence was reported by the security forces or any other government authority in the city this week. Abidjan residents also denied allegations on social networks.
Thursday, the National Agency of the country for the security of information systems in Côte d’Ivoire (ANSSI) denied rumors.
In a press release published on local media sites, the agency said: “Publications currently traveling on network X claim that a coup has taken place in Côte d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast] … This statement is completely unfounded. It is the result of a deliberate and coordinated disinformation campaign. »»
Rumors intervene only a few weeks after the popular opposition politics, Tidjane Thiam, was prohibited from presenting himself to the elections after his eligibility was challenged before the court for technicality relating to its citizenship status. Thiam appeals to the decision and affirms that the prohibition is political.
Côte d’Ivoire, the power of cocoa in Africa, has a long history of electoral violence, with an episode a decade ago a decade ago in an armed conflict that killed thousands of people.
The fear that President Alassane Ouattara will appear for a fourth term added to tensions this time. Although the country has a limit of two terms for the presidents, a constitutional amendment in 2016 resets the clock according to its conditions, the supporters of the president claim, allowing him to run for a third term of five years in 2020. This same argument could also see it on the ballots in October, despite what experts say is a general disillusionment with political creation in the country.
Here is what we know about the current political situation in the country:
How did the rumors of the coup starting?
Videos showing hundreds of people demonstrating in the streets and fires in stores and shopping centers began to appear on social media sites on Wednesday this week. The Frenchman is the official language of Côte d’Ivoire, but most of the articles and blogs with images claiming to come from Abidjan and claiming that a coup d’etat was in progress was written in English.
Some positions also said that the country’s chief of the country’s army, Lassina Doumbia, had been assassinated and that President Ouattara was missing. These statements were false and were refused by the president’s office. The credible media, including the Ivorian state media and the private media, have not reported alleged violence.
We do not know how rumors that President Ouattara lacked. On Thursday, he chaired a routine cabinet meeting in the capital. He also attended a ceremony commemorating the former revered president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, alongside Togolese President Faure Gnassingbe.
Why are there political tensions in the country?
The next general elections of October 25 are at the origin of the country’s current political tensions.
In the past, the elections were violent: during the general elections of October 2010, former president Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power to Ouattara, who was proclaimed by the electoral commission.
Tented political negotiations failed, and the situation was finally disturbed in the armed civil war, with the forces of Ouattara, supported by the French troops, besieging the national army of Gbagbo. France is the old colonial power in Côte d’Ivoire, and Ouattara has close links with Paris.
Some 3,000 people were killed in violence. The capture of Gbagbo on April 11, 2011 marked the end of the conflict. It was then tried and acquitted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes in 2019.
This painful story has stimulated fears that this year’s polls can also become violent, because several opposition candidates, including Gbagbo, have been prohibited from presenting themselves, mainly due to past convictions. In 2018, the former president was condemned in absentia to a sentence of 20 years in prison on the looting of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) during the country’s post-electoral crisis.
Last December, the leader of the Houphouetist Party for Democracy and Peace (RHDP) appointed Ouattara for a fourth term as president. Until now, Ouattara has refused to say if he intends to run, triggering concerns among the Ivorians, many of whom think that the president has exceeded his welcome. Analysts, however, see the appointment of the party as a preparation of the way for its possible candidacy.
Analysts also say that there is a very sympathy for young military leaders who have taken power in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, and who have maintained a hostile position towards France, unlike Ouattara.
What is Ouattara’s popular vision?
He was congratulated for supervised rapid economic stability in the last and a half decade, which has made the country the regional economic center.
Ouattara is also recognized for bringing a certain level of political peace to the country. In 2023, he welcomed Back Gbagbo, who had lived in Brussels since his acquittal ICC in 2021. Since then, electoral campaigns have not been as inflamed as they were in the 2000s when Gbagbo played on ethnic feelings to encourage opposition to Ouattara, whose father was from Burkina Faso.
However, Ouattara critics accuse him of fighting to preserve power unconstitutionally. Some also accuse him of constraining state institutions of making the railway of his political opponents, including in the last case involving Thiam.
Its proximity to France, which is increasingly considered to be arrogant and neo-colonial, in particular by young people through a French-speaking West Africa, has not won the president of the large population of the country under 35.
Who is Tidjane Thiam, and why was it excluded from the elections?
Thiam, 62, is an eminent politician and businessman in Ivorian political circles. He is a nephew of the Venerated Houphouet-Boigny and was the first Ivorian to pass the entrance exam to the prestigious polytechnic engineering school in France. He returned from France to serve as Minister of Planning and Development from 1998 to 1999, when a coup collapsed the civil government and the army took control of the country.
Thiam refused a cabinet post offered by the military government and left the country. He then held large -scale positions, first as director general of the UK Insurance Group, prudential, then as head of the CREDIT Swiss CREDIT World Investment Bank. A business spy scandal at the bank led to its resignation in 2020 after a colleague accused Thiam of having spied on him. Thiam has been authorized for any involvement.
After his return to Côte d’Ivoire in 2022, Thiam returned to politics and joined the Democratic Party (PDCI), the former ruling party which held the power of independence in 1960 until 1999 coup, and which is now the main opposition party.
In December 2023, party delegates voted massively so that Thiam was the next leader after the death of former chief and former president Henri Konan Bedie. At the time, PDCI officials said Thiam was a breath of fresh air for the country’s policy, and that many young people seemed ready to support him as the next president.
But his ambitions stopped on April 22 when a judge ordered that his name be taken from the list of contenders because Thiam had taken French nationality in 1987 and had automatically lost Ivorian citizenship according to the laws of the country.
Although the politician has renounced his French nationality in February of this year, the court judged that he had not done so before registering on the electoral list in 2022, and was therefore unacceptable to be the party leader, a presidential candidate or even a voter.
Thiam and his lawyers argued that the law is incoherent. Ivorian footballers of the country’s national team, said Thiam in an interview with journalists, are also French nationals, but are not confronted with restrictions on Ivorian nationality. “In the end, I was born in Ivorian,” Thiam told the BBC in an interview, accusing the government of trying to block what he said is the probable success of his party in this year’s elections.
Can Thiam stand up and who is standing?
It is not clear if Thiam can legally return to the list of candidates, but he tries.
In May, he resigned from his post as president of the PDCI and was almost immediately re -elected with 99% of the votes. He has not yet revealed if he will try to re -register as a candidate, but has promised to maintain the fight.
Thiam is committed to attracting industrial investments in the country as he once did as a minister and to withdraw the country from the CFA money economy supported by France which includes the countries of the West and Central Africa previously colonized by France, and sees their currencies fixed to the euro.
Meanwhile, other strong candidates include Pascal Affi N’Guessan, 67, former Prime Minister and Relatives of Gbagbo, who will represent the Ivorian Popular Front of Gbagbo (FPI).
Simone Gbagbo, the former First Lady who is now divorced from Gbagbo, will also show up, as a candidate for the movement of capable generations. She was sentenced to a 20 -year term in 2015 to undermine state security, but benefited from an amnesty law to promote national reconciliation later in 2018.
