[AFRICANEWS] With six months to go before the elections, the campaign is shaping up to be very tense in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
 ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo , which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
, with the opposition raging against a regime determined to stay in power, against a backdrop of conflict in the east and social crisis.
A single-round presidential election is scheduled for 20 December in this vast country of some 100 million inhabitants, along with elections for national and provincial deputies and local councilors. Félix Tshisekedi, President since January 2019, is running for a second five-year term.
Having experienced this at the time of the previous elections, which were postponed for two years, some Congolese still have doubts about the organization of the vote in time and are expecting what they call a "landslide".
But the authorities insist that the elections will indeed take place "within the constitutional timeframe" and, above all, the National Electoral Commission (CENI) has so far kept to its timetable.
It has "enrolled" (registered) voters and issued them with cards. This has enabled it to redo the electoral register, which was cleaned up by an "external audit" and served as the basis for the law on the "distribution of seats", which was promptly passed by Parliament and promulgated on 15 June.
Technically, "the CENI has demonstrated that it can meet the deadlines... A shift is less and less likely", notes Trésor Kibangula, political analyst at the Ebuteli research institute.
Confidence and transparency are a different story.
At the end of last year, Ebuteli expressed concern that the electoral process was "badly underway", with the risk of "violent mostly peaceful demonstrations". At issue: the highly controversial composition of the CENI itself and the Constitutional Court, the last electoral lock.
"In fact, at the legal level, the government has all the levers", says another observer of Congolese politics, speaking on condition of anonymity
... for fear of being murdered...
.
For several weeks now, the groups of four opponents who are declared presidential candidates have been organising demonstrations to demand an overhaul of these bodies, which they believe will lead to fraud and chaos.
These opponents, Martin Fayulu, Moïse Katumbi, Matata Ponyo and Delly Sesanga, also consider that the electoral register is "fanciful", because "enrolment" could not take place in territories plagued by armed violence and because the "audit" was carried out in a record time of five days.
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