The 47-year-old former army general beat another former prime minister, Domingos Simoes Pereira, who had come out ahead in the initial round of voting
Umaro Sissoco Embalo won the Dec. 29 runoff with about 54 per cent of the votes, the electoral commission said.A former prime minister of Guinea-Bissau, Umaro Sissoco Embalo, has won the country’s presidential elections, the electoral commission announced Wednesday.
Embalo will succeed incumbent President Jose Mario Vaz, who also failed to reach the second round of voting. Embalo served as prime minister under Vaz from 2016 to 2018.Vaz, in power since 2014, has vowed to respect his defeat in a rare gesture of political stability. In a tear-filled New Year’s speech, he urged the new leaders to work toward stability.
The second round of elections was endorsed as free and transparent by the observer mission of the influential West Africa economic group, ECOWAS, although it noted a low voter turnout. Guinea-Bissau, a small nation of around 1.5 million people, has long been beset by corruption and drug trafficking. In the 2000s, it became known as a transit point for cocaine between Latin America and Europe as traffickers profited from corruption and weak law enforcement.
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